Business in General blog

Tim Berry will be the guest of Rick Jensen today on WDEL, 1150 AM in Wilmington, Delaware.

From Rick’s blog:

Call-In Line: 478-9335

Thinking of ways to make a little more money as the cost of EVERYTHING goes up? Do you have an idea for a part-time business? Talk with Tim Berry, president and founder of Palo Alto Software, founder of bplans.com, co-founder of Borland International, author of books and software on business planning, Stanford MBA. He’s done it, written about it and teaches how to get it done.

Talk with Tim at 2:07 PM, tomorrow, Wednesday, June 25th!

You can listen to the show via the WDEL website. www.wdel.com

That’s 2:07 PM Eastern Time, so 1:07 Central Time, 12:07 Mountain Time, and 11:07 AM on the West Coast.

Posted under Palo Alto Software News on June 25th, 2008 | No Comments »

Last week saw the thrust and parry of dueling keyboards as [a mainstream media consortium] took umbrage with the blogosphere, and bloggers’ frequent quotations from the [mmc]’s posted stories. There were demands for the take-down of various blog pages, and attempts to collect fees-per-word of quotes, as well as rapier-like witty ripostes. You can read about this on the TechCrunch blog, Post 1, and and Post 2.

While this issue seems, on the surface, to be about copyright, fair use, and possibly expansion of new revenue streams, it also deals with attribution and citing of sources. This is not just for journalists. It is just as important to entrepreneurs.

When you write your business plan, especially if you are using the plan to secure funding, you must cite your sources. Your plan will have topics and statistics covering your target market, population demographics, spending habits, market trends, market growth, and the like. The banks or investors or VCs are savvy business people. They know how to double check your assumptions, and will have no qualms about calling your bluff…and quashing your funding if they don’t credit your stats.

If your business is going to provide day care services, you’d better be able to show an increase in young dual-income families in your area. Investors are unlikely to support the construction of high-end mansions in a community that has been losing all of its industry. If you forecast skyrocketing sales, you’d better be able to document how a similar product or service did the same, and why yours will follow suit, and not crash and burn in a saturated market niche.

In other words you can’t pull your projections out of your … that is, out of thin air! Do your research! Develop your forecasts using that information. Document your sources in your plan. Take a look at this blog post by Alan Gleeson, Managing Director of Palo Alto Software Ltd, in the UK. The post quotes several people, businesses and news sources, and includes links and footnotes. Your business plan should do the same, giving the proper attribution to your sources.

As a raconteur I can make it up as I go along. As a business owner you don’t have that luxury.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Tags: attribution, business plan, citing sources, document forecasts, quotes, research
Posted under Business Plan Competitions, General, General Business Planning, Market Research, Sales Forecasting, Startup Business on June 25th, 2008 | No Comments »

One of Palo Alto Software’s most popular websites is www.bplans.com website, on that free resource website you can find hundreds of articles on a wide array of business planning information from starting your business to incorporation and buying a business.

We also have a page full of extremely helpful business calculators.

One of our most popular calculators is the Cash Flow Calculator.

Many startups and small businesses fail despite being nominally profitable. When it is time to pay the bills, cash is king. This handy calculator helps you see the effect of sales, inventory, credit terms, and other variables on your company’s cash flow.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: bplans.com, business tool, calculator, Cash Flow, free
Posted under Business Information, Cash Flow, General Business Planning, Sales Forecasting on June 24th, 2008 | No Comments »

I just read a great article about a public high school in Boston that makes a class called “Ventures” a requirement for graduation. All their students must take a class the involves writing a business plan and pitching it to business people as well as pitching themselves to a local company for a 6 week internship.

It is refreshing to see a public school giving its students a real education. Not just teaching to the test as all schools seem to do this day. Not just making do with the curriculum provided by the state and teaching the minimum, which is why more than 80% of high school students can not locate France on a map, let alone Iraq.  This school is giving kids a taste of what it is like to be in the real working world. The kids must research their business in order to write the plan. They must talk to real live businesses and get information for the competitive research. They must think about real life things like cash flow and loans and legal implications.  They even have to show up to their presentations in business attire. The kids will get a little taste of what it takes to be taken seriously in the real world. They may also get a little taste of what it can take to actually start and run a business. They are getting information and experiences that even most college kids don’t get.

I applaud Fenway School in Boston. Hurray for teachers who actually want to equip our kids with tools for the real world. Hurray for teachers who actually want to teach important relevant stuff.  And hurray for the students that get this opportunity!

Sabrina Parsons aka Mommy CEO

www.paloalto.com

Posted under General on June 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

The people of Estonia decided they’d had enough of the garbage that littered their countryside and forests.

Instead of waiting for the government to take care of it, or turning a blind eye and hoping it would just go away, they did something about it.

50,000 people scoured fields, streets, forests and riverbanks across the country, picking up everything from tractor batteries to paint tins (see a BBC video here). Much of this junk was ferried to central dumps, often in the vehicles of volunteers.  ~Anthony D Williams

I am literally boggled by this. 50,000 people, in one day, all went out into the countryside and helped make a difference. Fantastic!

This initiative, Let’s Do It!, was organized by two entrepreneurs, Ahti Heinla from Skype and Rainer Nolvak from Delfi. The fact that this was organized by entrepreneurs doesn’t surprise me in the least. They used Google Maps to start the grassroots program to map and photograph the problem trash sites.

Neighboring Latvia, not to be outdone, decided to do a clean up as well.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if this kind of thinking went viral?

Each country trying to out clean the other? Tens of thousands of people getting out of their houses, all to put their good intentions to work.

Imagine the next Earth Day where everyone, across the world pledged just an hour of their time that day to go out and clean up.

Now, imagine if we all actually did it.

Imagine how fantastic that would be.

‘Chelle Parmele
Palo Alto Software

Tags: entrepreneurship, green
Posted under General on June 19th, 2008 | No Comments »

So everybody (pretty much) agrees that your employees are your greatest asset, and similar clichés, but how do you actually act on that? I just read Zane Safrit’s Tips and Resources to Hire the Best | Small Business Trends on Small Business Trends. His list of six good tips include three as readings, but still, this is an important subject. As so often happens with Small Business Trends, the comments are useful too.

Tim Berry
President
Palo Alto Software

Tags: hiring employees small-business
Posted under Management on June 18th, 2008 | No Comments »

While some people associate business planning narrowly with sales forecasting, or as a means to obtaining investment, it can also be used by companies to assess the impact of changes to the environmental context. This analysis of the future can help inform strategies and tactics in the present, which help to minimise the likelihood of certain outcomes, particularly negative ones happening in the future.

I spotted an advert in a recent edition of Newsweek which resonated strongly with me. The advert was placed by a company that clearly had one eye on the future, had identified a significant threat to a key supplier and had begun to put in place a number of clever activities in an attempt to protect this key supplier.

Who was the key supplier?

It is the humble honey bee, and the company in question is Haagen-Dazs.

Recognising that the ingredients it uses in its ice cream rely heavily on pollination by honey bees, Haagen-Dazs has set up a website which strives to raise awareness of the alarming decline in honey bees. The advert in Newsweek went one step further, consisting of an advert alongside a printed recyclable sheet embedded with wild flower seeds. The instructions suggested you ‘save a bee‘ by planting the page and watering it.

Not only is this a clever campaign that both engages and drives action, but also one that essentially carries no cost for the consumer. In economic terms it is a great solution to a real growing strategic problem, and also a very effective marketing ploy. For ice cream lovers the world over, it is also a very worthy cause!

Alan Gleeson
Palo Alto Software Ltd (U.K.)

Tags: business plan, business planning, ice cream, Marketing, Strategy, suppliers
Posted under Business Education, General Business Planning, Marketing, Small Business, Startup Business, Strategy on June 17th, 2008 | No Comments »

I found the following story on several Internet sites.

At New York’s Kennedy airport today, an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, and a calculator.

The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security believe the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Al-Gebra is a very fearsome cult, indeed. They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on a tangent in a search of absolute value.

They consist of quite shadowy figures, with names like “x” and “y”, and, although they are frequently referred to as “unknowns”, we know they really belong to a common denominator and are part of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country.

As the great Greek mathematician Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle, and if God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.

Therefore, I’m extremely grateful that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are so willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard.

These statistic scumbags love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence.

Under the circumferences, it’s time we differentiated their root, made our point, and drew the line. These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimate everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.

As our Great Leader would say, “Read my ellipse.”

Here is one principle he knows with certainty, they continue to multiply, their days are numbered and the hypotenuse will tighten around their necks.

Funny, yes? I think so.

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning-bug.”

The story above is also a cautionary tale about spell checker software, and the almost-right word. Everything in that story is spelled correctly, but many words are very incorrect in the context of Homeland Security. My spell checker just breezed right on by those.

If you make similar mistakes in the business plan you submit, the bank, the investors, the venture competition judges, or your MBA professors will also get a good laugh … and keep right on chuckling as they send your plan to the Out box.

Proofread your plan. Have someone who wasn’t involved in writing the plan read it over. Implement the edit suggestions you receive.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

Tags: , business plan, edit, funding, investment, proof read, spell checker, spelling, venture, words
Posted under Business Plan Competitions, General, General Business Planning, Small Business, Startup Business on June 17th, 2008 | No Comments »

Does email make us more productive? Has the pendulum swung so far that email has become a productivity drain? Good questions, posted yesterday by Ben Worthen of The Wall Street Journal in Tech Companies Join to Stop Email Addiction:

How bad a problem is information pollution? A typical office worker checks email more than 50 times a day, instant messages 77 times and visits 40-plus Web sites a day, according to study by tracking-software maker RescueTime cited by the Times. The research company Basex, which is a member of the IORG, last year reported that businesses waste $650 billion a year because of information pollution. Most of that is the productivity hit workers take when they’re interrupted by an email or other message – often for something inconsequential – and the time it takes to refocus on the task at hand.

Some very big corporate names are worried about this, worried enough to form the Information Overload Research Group. Writing in The New York Times, Matt Richtel called it Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast:

The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.

Intel and other companies are already experimenting with solutions. Small units at some companies are encouraging workers to check e-mail messages less frequently, to send group messages more judiciously and to avoid letting the drumbeat of digital missives constantly shake up and reorder to-do lists.

A Google software engineer last week introduced E-Mail Addict, an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes.

Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at the research firm Basex and a member of the new group’s board, said the companies realized they faced a monster of their own creation. He pointed to a Silicon Valley maxim that companies should “eat their own dog food,” meaning they should make use of their own innovations.

“They’re realizing they’re eating too much,” Mr. Spira said.

Many people readily recognize that they face — or invite — continual interruption, but the emerging data on the scale of the problem may come as a surprise.

I think this may be part of a common cycle, in which the new tech capabilities make us more productive for a while, then expectations catch up. Or, in the case of email, realities engulf us.

Tim Berry
President
Palo Alto Software

Posted under General on June 17th, 2008 | No Comments »

Coming to work 3 years ago for Palo Alto Software was quite a change from my previous post of 10 years in corporate America. One of the many refreshing changes: a family friendly company. It is not unusual to see a tot in the office from time to time, stopping in with mom or dad. My colleague Josh recently had his 13 year old son in for a few hours to see what his dad does. I got to sneak him in to one of my conference calls. It was fun to see him taking it all in. When my daughter was born, Palo Alto gave us a generous gift basket full of baby gear, and delivered hot meals to our house the first few days we were home from the hospital. This is common practice for new parents here.

A company is smart to engage in such practices when possible and as appropriate to their work environment. There are a wide variety of relatively low cost way to ensure happy (translation: productive) employees. Offering such perks has no doubt had an effect on the employee loyalty that exists here at PAS. Our annual retention rate averages about 95%.

From a bottom line perspective, being proactive in creating employee satisfaction pays off. SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, estimated that it costs $3,500.00 to replace one $8.00 per hour employee when all costs — recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training, reduced productivity, etc, were considered. Other sources provided estimates that it costs 30-50% of the annual salary of entry-level employees, 150% of mid-level employees, and up to 400% for high level employees.

Ross Blake of Retention Associates offers a few tips on keeping retention in check:

1. Put a retention program in place before you have a crisis situation. You not only must find out why employees leave your organization, you must also find out why others stay.

2. Survey your top performers now in order to find out what keeps them there, why they might leave, what type of competitive offers they may find attractive, and what they need to be happier and more productive in their jobs.

Sources estimate that a 10% reduction in employee turnover is worth more money than a 10% increase in productivity, or a 10% increase in sales. This might be a component you want to consider when writing or updating your business plan. Keeping employees happy is no accident!

Beth Anne Whalen

Palo Alto Software, Inc.

Posted under General on June 16th, 2008 | 1 Comment »