By Adam Urbanski (c) 2008

If you’ve tried your hand at building an Internet-based business but haven’t yet reached the success you want, find out about these 11 deadly mistakes and how to avoid them.

Mistake #1 - Not Treating What You Do as a Business.

The difference between a hobby and a business is that a hobby doesn’t make you money - it costs you money. If you’re earnest about starting a profitable online business, approach seriously and focus on generating revenue. Treat your online business as you would any regular business.

Mistake #2 - Being Distracted by Too Many Good Ideas.

You can light up a room with a light bulb, but you can cut through steel with a laser beam. The same is true with your effort and ideas.

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Both North American eBays - Canada and the USA - have announced two weeks of cheap listing fees for fixed price listings.

On both sites from July 16th to July 29th (inclusive), insertion fees for Fixed Price (FP or BIN) lisitngs are fixed at $0.25 in all price tranches.  Listing upgrade fees and other options, including final value fees still apply.  Some Business and industrial categories are not included.

The announcements don’t state if multi-item listings are permitted, though they usually are on these sites’ promotion days.  Try a test listing to find out.

Unusually, the Canadian offer applies to non-residents, something the site has frequently disallowed in past years, but has been opening up to more frequently in 2008.

If you’re outside the US or Canada - watch the eBay exchange rate daily for your currency against the $ - eBay UK updates their exchange rate around 11am during BST, and it is now diverging rapidly from the exchange rate used by PayPal - even though they are both supposed to pull the rate from XE.com

The weak US dollar means that as long as eBay UK are exchanging at under 50-pence to the UK Pound, UK sellers will benefit from rounding down and save an extra 1-2 cents per listing.  Watch you Seller Account daily billing to see where the exchange rate is at.  (I’m betting that exchange rates on eBay will move counter-intuitively to the money markets for the next fortnight, and bump the dollar over 50-pence for better fee receipts for dot com).

Ed

To paraphrase the legend of Robert the Bruce - “recycle, recycle, and recycle again”. 

Recycling is not only good for the environment, it’s good for your businesses bank balance.

Whilst the paperless office is about as attainable as a feasible ashtray for a motorbike, there is lots that can be done to obtain the maximum value from your stationary costs.  You probably already re-use computer print-outs as scrap note pads, and if you’re like most people, your automatic method is to tear the A4 sheets into 4 pieces giving you 4″ x 6″ note sheets.  Don’t!

Zoom down to your local stationers and buy a box of A5 clip boards, and only tear those A4 sheets in half.  Use the clip boards to keep the papers tidy and organised on the desks.  When the bits of paper are finished with, A5 size is far more useful for shredding to create packaging material than the tiny 4×6’s.

Fed-up of junk mail and brochures through your door?  I used to be too but then I found a use for them.  Most shredded office waste used for packaging materials is a boring white or manilla brown.  Those brochures (particularly the supermarket ones with lots of eye-catching red in them) add a nice splash of mixed colours to the shredding bin.  Save them up all year for shredding in November and add colour for your pre-Christmas parcel despatches.  It sounds crazy, but it really does help to get staff and customers alike into the festive mood.  Try it this year and you’ll see what I mean.

On the topic of supermarkets, have you ever noticed how much bubble-wrap they dump in their skips?  As we all know, plastics are amongst the most difficult things to recycle - they simply refuse to bio-degrade.  With increased government tendencies towards taxing landfill garbage, your local supermarket manager will probably be more than happy for you to scavenge the plastics from his trash. 

It’ll also save you a small fortune in packaging materials if you ship a lot of items that need padding.  It could also become a business venture in its own right - recovering and reselling used bubble-wrap …. if you can stop your staff from childishly popping the bubbles

Ed

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Potentially your biggest business cost savings could come from servers, software, bandwidth, and energy.

Never buy new servers from a brand-name vendor.  Refurbish standard no-name hardware bought from imploding startups or roll your own to spec.  In small and home businesses, server requirements are rarely more than just a central repository for data, connection to the internet (maybe also to the copper telephone system for faxes), and a central user authorisation system.

You don’t need chunky, rack-mounted, or special boxes for that.  Most of the software used for those purposes today, will still run on the server specs I was building 10 years ago - Pentium-I 200MHz MMX cpu with 256 MB RAM and twin hard drives mirrored into a RAID-1 array.  That spec might be a little slow for the demands of the modern internet, but it will still do the job if you run the right server operating system (Windows 2000 or NT 4.0).  You can see from that total spec that you can buy a lot of that for peanuts, although, beware of trying to run NT with todays massive hard drives having 3-digits of GB size - it’ll spit the dummy if you don’t install sector-translation software during the NT install.

If you run multiple printers and they don’t need to be scattered all over your premises, hook them all up to another older technology PC running NT Workstation or non-server Windows 2000 (or Linux or similar), bung in a minimum of 256 MB of RAM (any old RAM - it doesn’t need to be fast) and an old 20-40 GB hard drive.  That’ll be your print server, and it’ll take an unbelievable strain off your desktop workstations and main server, especially during peak printing periods such as first thing in the morning when you’re printing invoices for the overnight sales.

Always use open source and free software when its feasible.  Leverage your own and your developers’ talent in growing homebrew solutions for CRM and infrastructure requirements.  Look for third party alternatives to the money pit of enterprise solutions packages.  Running Linux, FireFox, and Open Office as your core desktop solution will save you around £200 /$400 per desktop.

Instead of buying expensive dedicated bandwith you don’t need 24/7, look at your incoming phone lines.  If you have a line going to a fax machine in reception, convert it to ADSL and run the data side of the splitter to your router as backup bandwidth for your IT network, especially if you can get the line from a different provider to your main connection - it’ll provide redundancy in case your main ISP has a power-outage.  It’ll also be a low cost solution leveraging a little-used fixed expense you already pay.  You can program your server or router to include use of that extra line by default during high internet traffic periods, reducing delays at the desktops and improving productivity from your staff.

Become a total power conservation nazi at every point of your business.  This will become ever-more crucial if you’ listened to, or read the UK Chancellor’s budget speech this month.  Britain is carbon enforcing in every way, from vehicles to business to home.  There’ll soon be legal enforcements of energy efficiency and carbon emmission reduction, so start now.   Hibernate machines after 5 minutes of non use.  Replace incandescent lighting with flourescent bulbs.  Recycle waste heat.  Telecommute or use flexi-time to reduce transport overheads.   Seeing your energy bill drop even 10% will feel like winning the lottery.

Ed

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In many businesses, large and small, it’s a tradition to start the week (or day) with some form of management or strategy meeting.  Over the year, that adds up to a lot of wasted hours from the “production” schedule.

Try having these meetings at lunchtime and pay for lunch for your staff - meet while you munch - it makes use of “dead time” when people are not normally working, incentivises attendance (free lunch), and can be a useful motivational tool.  A small $1.00 / 50 pence chocolate or cream cake awarded to the person attending who makes the most useful contribution to the meeting - voted on by the attendees, not the boss.  Small touches like that pay off in terms of staff enthusiasm and it encourages them to be pro-active and contributory to the running of the business.

Ed

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Buy your hardest working employees computers for home if they don’t already have them

If you have staff who are willing to work an extra hour a day per week, you should provide them with a home computer.  Once you get to three hours of work a week from home you’re at 150 hours a year “bonus” effort.  Invest in equipment if the person is a workaholic or has an aptitude for promoting your business on blog comments or discussion forums - it’ll pay off over time in additional sales leads or contracts.

Often you’ll find that staff complete documents (or similar) far better at weekends, when they have the relaxed environment of working on them from home - the natural distractions of home life create “thinking breaks” where they can mentally revise and structure what they’re working on, without the pressure of feeling they must be seen to be working.

Allow your staff to work flexible hours.  Commuting is a pain and is a waste of time for everyone.  Let them start at 6am, or 11am, if it makes life easier for them, and you’ll cut their commute in half.  I know from commuting into London years ago that changing my start or finish time by an hour used to save up to two hours commuting in each direction, and that at key times of the year it could make the journey 30-40 minutes instead of hours.

Ed

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Any experience small business entrepreneur will be able to explain the cost-creepage associated with a telephone on every desk.

It’s not just about employees making personal calls, it’s also about the uneccesary inter-desk calls that become protracted and due to the loss of face-to-face interaction, can lead to misunderstandings and reduced co-operation.

PBX-type internal telephone systems are not cheap either, even when second-hand.  Apart from buying the hardware, there’s the installation costs and the monthlies for multiple external lines, which for most of the day are idle.  Plus, nowadays, a lot of people are happier using their mobile phone for receiving business calls, than they are about being “tied” to their desks by a traditional handset. 

If you feel you really must have a telephone system installed, look for an supplier that remarkets used systems (either from businesses that have upgraded, or those that shut down for whatever reason) you can often save 60% - 90% by using a model that’s one or two generations older than the current technology.  Save additional hardware costs by putting a combined fax-telephone on the office admin, or receptionist, desk.  Despite the e-hype, traditional faxes are not going away, there’s still a need for them.

Call-exchange based systems really only make sense in telesales based small businesses nowadays, and even then, using VoIP systems such as Skype, via the business computer network, are far cheaper solutions, both at installation, and ongoing.  If your business has computers on mosat or all desktops, why not use Skype as the internal telephone system as well as the outgoing call system network?  User-to-user calls are free, and long distance calls can be significantly cheaper than landlines.

Ed

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Buy cheap tables as desks, but good quality office chairs.

Why spend a small fortune on “pro” desks that most of the time are only used to support the working tools of office working?  A far lower priced, sturdy, folding table will often do the same job, and it will free up budget for the far more important chairs.

Provided the tables are the same high as “approved” desks, dont have a raised lip (to dig into the underside of your fore-arms when typing or writing), and won’t bow or collapse under the weight of destop equipment, then they’re doing an identical job to an expensive office desk.

Saving costs where appropriate, and spending them where essential should be a key part of the business plan for all small and groeing businesses.  If your workers “must” have at-desk drawers, head down to MFI and buy one of those $30.00 / £14.99 self-assembly 2-drawer filing cabinet units.  Many of them now have locking top drawers for securing women’s hand bags etc.

Don’t skimp on the chairs though - they have a far greater impact on employee comfort and job-satisfaction than the desk / table, and there may be workplace ergonomics laws related to them.  Good seats will keep bums on them for longer.

Ed

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