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When I wrote about creating a personal ad in place of a bio this is exactly what I was getting at - being the one-and-only you helps you stand out in a sea of competitors.  Then I ran across  (via @jer979) Andy’s post over at GasPedal  titled Tell Me Your Story. 

Andy’s post reinforced that it is our personal stories that make us stand out and help our contacts remember us.   I think it’s also refreshing to take the time to reflect on why we do what we do - what is it that makes us passionate?

Here is my challenge for you: write an interesting personal story about why you do what you do and how it makes you different.  Here are a couple of steps to help get you started (using my own example):

1. Brainstorm (aka - free form write on a blank sheet or white board) what’s interesting about you?  Don’t question what you’re writing just capture everything that pops into your head.

2. Organize the words into three categories:

1. Why I’m passionate about my work
2. Fun stuff unrelated to work
3. Other

3. Answer the following:

1. Who am I?  Literally - who are you? What makes you qualified to do the work you do? My name is Angie and I have a degree in Business & Marketing and 10+ years of experience.  
2. What problem do I solve? If you don’t know (and many people don’t) ask your customers.  This is the difference between “I do marketing” and “I help small businesses grow through better communication with their customers and prospects.”
3. Why do I do what I do? (use the words from your brainstorm) “I think small businesses are critical to our success as a society, a country, and an economy; I’m passionate about helping them succeed.”
4. How I am different?  This is a combination of what your customers tell you and the story of your passion. Think about how you’ve arrived at where you are today and what applies to why you do what you do.
   

Put it together:

My name is Angie and I have a degree in Business & Marketing and 10+ years of experience.  I help small businesses grow through better communication with their customers and prospects.  I think small businesses are critical to our success as a society, a country, and an economy;  I’m passionate about helping them succeed. 

 

I started my career in a small, family run barcoding business.  I handled everything from our CRM implementation and sales lead reporting, to our manufacturer co-op programs and placing ads in trade journals and even the phone book.  After a year, I was questioning whether technology marketing was the right thing for me (those of you who think I’m a geek might be surprised at this!)  But as it turns out I think I was just getting bored.  When we opened up a position for a product manager on a new suite of Wireless LAN software tools - I raised my hand, got turned down twice, and finally convinced the family to let me have it.  I’ve been hooked on tech ever since getting my head around the possibilities it represents.  I was also hooked on small business - every little thing I did actually made an impact to the business and I had great insight into the big picture and knew how my actions would direct the future of the company. What I learned in my first career job was that in a small business we all have a ton on our plate and marketing has to be practical and realistic to be successful.  Having worked with companies large and small, my clients appreciate that I’m practical and programmatic, but I don’t settle for the status quo and I’m always looking for creative ways to make things better.

4. Add in some of the fun things about you outside of work:

• I am a Commissioner for the Seattle Center - Seattle’s 74-acre urban park providing amazing free and low cost public programming (including 22 cultural festivals) and home to Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle Opera, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle International Film Festival, the Space Needle, Pacific Science Center, Key Arena, Children’s Theatre and Museum and so much more.  I’m quite proud to be serving the Mayor and City Council as we shape the future of this awesome place.
  
• I’m learning Italian - I love the culture and the language is beautiful (not when I’m speaking it, but I’ll get there eventually).
  
• I love to garden in sunny weather and snowboard in soft, fluffy powder (to cushion my falls).
• Cooking and eating might be one of my favorite pastimes.
  
• I don’t have a microwave - our last one broke and when we took it out we liked the space so much we never replaced it!  
• We don’t have cable TV - I still manage to watch plenty of the ol’ Tube, but have fallen in love with public programming (we’re blessed with an amazing group here in the Northwest).

What do you think?  I love candid feedback so please don’t hold back!

This is a really important step in the development of your personal brand and worth spending the time and energy to get it to a point where you’re really happy.  While you may not be looking for a job, this applies if you’re looking for clients too!  Check out the May issue of Personal Branding Magazine to hear tips from some top online brands (that’s right - they’re people, not products!) like Anita Campbell @SmallBizTrends and Toby Bloomberg @TobyDiva.

This entry was posted in Small Business

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If I get personal (aka include non-work related things) in my bio…is it a personal ad?  A bio needs to be professional and serious and convince any potential prospect why they want to work with you.  Or does it?  Have you looked at Linked-in lately?  Wow..what a boring sea of bios.  In a pool of 10 people who provide the same service, it’s tough to find one whose bio says anything different.  This applies to websites too; your business card, accessible by the world, should say something to differentiate you. 

In a market where getting new customers often  relies on how high up in the Search ranks you show, how do you stand out?  By saying the same thing as the 9 other companies like yours?  Or by putting some character into it?

I’m taking a stand and writing a personal ad in place of my bio because, while my work qualifications are important, it’s my personal experiences and  my story that speak to my character and the type of person I am. 

As a small business, we often weigh the comfort of being ourselves and the perception of being bigger.  For those of us small business folks who are interested in working with people like us, we should feel free to be interesting and not feel committed to the status quo just because it seems like that’s the professional thing to do.   As the web - and the marketplace in general - get flooded with “sameness” being interesting by  being yourself (the one and only you) becomes more and more important!

I think Toby Bloomberg over at Diva Marketing Blog, has a great bio.  It’s well balanced: flowing through professional accolades but sprinkled with personal experience and interests.

Always open to a conversation, tell me what you think!

This entry was posted in New Features

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We formally announced the availability of invoicing interface for iPhone and Android.  If you have been touting an iPhone,  you can further expand on its business use by recording charges, adding or updating your client details, or sending invoices. To access these feature, point your phone browser to https://app.simplifythis.com/m.  And to avoid typing the url again and again, we recommend adding the page to your home screen.  And one word of caution: If you have a tendency to lose your phone, make sure to log out after use; the authentication is valid for long to save you from the trouble of entering your user id and password every time.

Very soon, we’ll add project and time tracking to it as well.  If you have any other suggestion on SimplifyThis features that you would like to use from your iPhone, do let us know. We’ll try to get them in the next update.

This entry was posted in Small Business

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Hands down, the best approach to marketing and growing your business is through your relationships by turning customers and people in your network into Raving Fans.

Your customers will sell for you better than you can sell yourself:

1. They’ll tell you how you’re different
2. They’ll tell you what problems your product solves
3. They’ll tell others about you
4. They have access to a network of people you may not
5. They have credibility within your market now, that you must earn over time
6. If they’re really happy with your product or level of service, they’ll likely tell someone else

The concept of the Raving Fan isn’t new; chances are you’ve read about it in a book, seen it referenced in blogs or consider the notion of remarkable customer service just plain common sense.  No matter, it’s the sensible foundation for growing your business and, while we may all be aware of it, where the rubber hits the road is in our ability to put theory into action.

As chief marketer for SimplifyThis it’s up to me to figure out HOW.  I plan on taking you all along in the process because 1) I want you involved and 2) maybe you’ll gleam something for your own business (better to share and improve than reinvent the wheel).  So, stay tuned for more to come - and please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions, suggestions, or just to say hello!

You can subscribe here to follow this blog or follow me @smbiztools if you’re into Twitter.

This entry was posted in Tips and Tricks, New Features

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SimplifyThis did not have a way to send out automated annual invoices.  I had been skirting away from this in the past, hiding under the illusion that people can use a frequency of 365 days to approximate annual cycles.  Apparently, this was not good enough for many of you.  Frankly, I was surprised to see the number of annual auto-billing cycles.  I never thought that this would be the case.

Upon insistance from users, we have added an explicit annual frequency option in auto-bill.  This feature is deployed as of now.  So all the hosting service providers who bill their clients annualy for domain name, or annual set-up fee can now use this option.  As always, please do let me know if you have any feedback.

I have also received request for explicit quarterly auto-bill frequency.  I was tempted to add it while we were enabling annual cycle, but then realized that adding one more option would warrant an interface change.  Having too many options with radio-buttons to choose from would not be a good idea.  So, we’ll keep this for the next round.

This entry was posted in New Features

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Thanks to many suggestions from SimplifyThis users, we have a new fresh look for the invoices and estimates.  You’ll notice that there is more “breathing room” between fields and their labels, notes stand out clearly, and your business address goes right next to your logo at the top of the invoice.

I’m sure this new look will spark some discussions.  Please do provide your feedback. Let us know whether you like it or not, or write to us if you have any suggestion to improve the layout further.

This entry was posted in New Features

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Recently, we saw the announcement on Palm Pre (old news, I know).  Garmin and Asus are also coming up with their own OS.  And then you have Symbian, WinMo, Blackberry with over 1 million Storms sold,  Android our favorite: iPhone. Needless to say, it is difficult for us to build installable applications for all these phone platforms,and keep them up to date with the rapid feature additions to SimplifyThis.  Luckily, all these platforms provide decent browser support.  So, we have decided that instead of building individual applications for each of them, we would instead build a browser based user interface that is optimized for the small screen.   We are impressed with Apple’s webapp framework, and that is what we are using to build this new interface.

The preliminary screens look beautiful and very user friendly, almost as good as native iPhone applications.  We are simultaneously able to test the phone interface on Andriod phones also courtsey of a friend who lent his T-Mobile G1 for some time, and are pleasantly surprised with how well it works.

We hope to make this phone user interface available within next two weeks.  I would not say much about the list of features that this interface will support at this point, but we are trying to make it fully functional for sending invoices.  I’m sure many of you will use it and enjoy it.  While we may not be able to test it on all phones, we would look for your feedback on how this performs on other phones.

This entry was posted in Tips and Tricks

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We have been working hard to simplify addition of client facing pages (account management/appointment booking) to your website. However, we do realize that it is a bit confusing if you need to add these pages within an iframe on your site.  We were just reviewing some of the client pages, and noticed that a few of you have added links to these pages using the URL that is meant for embedding them in an iframe.  As a result, your logo and business information do not appear on these pages, and they look a bit weird.

We are working on simplifying the settings for client pages. Once this work is complete, you’ll have the option to explicitly choose between (i)  SimplifyThis displaying your logo and business name on these pages, or (ii) you would do it yourself , embedding these pages in an iframe. In the interim, please make a note of the following:

(i) If you are displaying the pages standalone and would like your logo + business information to appear on the page, select the option ‘ Show pages with my logo and address’. You’ll be asked to choose a unique sub-domain name.

(ii) If, however, you need to embed  the pages within an iframe, select the option ‘Do not show logo and address’.  This option will also allow you to customize the CSS for these pages so that you can match them with the outer page.

Please feel free to drop us a note or give us a call if you have any questions.

This entry was posted in Tips and Tricks

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I did not get a chance to write more about how you can use recurring appointments when we released this major feature.  Here are some possible scenarios that will help you in using this feature.

1. Rescheduling an occurrence or a series: If you have booked a recurring appointment and want to reschedule a particular occurrence, you can do so easily without modifying the recurring series.  Just open the calendar view and click on the occurrence that you want to reschedule.  You’ll notice an option to modify the selected occurrence or the entire series.  Select the option which will launch the appointment edit form.  Select new time and save.  This will reschedule the regular occurrence.  You’ll also notice the option to send cancellation email for regular occurrence and confirmation email for the new appointment.Also, as you would expect, your client and staff will get a reminder email for the rescheduled occurrence and not for the original occurrence.Keep in mind that if you happen to modify or reschedule an series, any particular occurrence that you may have rescheduled will get canceled.
2. Canceling a recurring appointment: You can either choose to cancel an entire recurring series, or a single occurrence. Just hover over one of the occurrence in the calendar view  and you’ll notice a red ‘x’ on top right corner.  Click on ‘x’ and you’ll get an option to either cancel the occurrence or the entire series.  If you cancel an occurrence, your client and staff will get cancellation email for that occurrence alone. If you cancel the whole series, they will get one email for the cancellation of the series.  Keep in mind that if you happen to cancel a series, any particular occurrence that you may have rescheduled will also get canceled.
3. Lunch hours: Blocking lunch hour is a good use of recurring appointments.  To do so, create a new recurring appointment that occurs weekly.  Select the staff for whom you are blocking lunch time. Make the recurrence occur every 1 week, and select all the work days of the week.  This also gives you the flexibility to unblock or change the lunch hour on a particular day if you need to.  Just double click on the occurrence that you want to change, and select “Edit this occurrence“.
4. Bi-weekly appointments: If you need to book appointments that occur bi-weekly, just create a recurring appointment that occurs weekly, and make it recur every 2 weeks.  Your calendar will be scheduled with appointments occurring every alternate week.
5. Quarterly Appointments: For quarterly appointments, create a recurring appointment that occurs monthly, and make it recur every 3 months. Select the day of month that you would the appointment to occur on, and save to schedule your quarterly appointment.

I am sure I have not covered all the scenarios. Look for subsequent posts as we get more questions from our users and come across interesting usage of this feature.

This entry was posted in New Features

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Well, I thought the best way to start posting in new year is to announce a major feature upgrade. So here it is: Now you can have multiple auto-bills per client.  Many businesses run more than one billing cycle for a client.  This feature is especially useful for them.  I have received many requests from hosting service providers who charge a monthly hosting fee and an annual domain name fee.  Since we had the limitation of only one auto-bill cycle per client, we used to suggest them to manually add line items for annual charges - admittedly not the best solution.  From here on, if you have clients that you need to invoice with more than one separate billing cycles, all you need to do is to create an auto-bill for each cycle.

You’ll also notice some changes in the “Activities” section. Now that there can be multiple auto-bills for each client, we thought that it would be important for you to take a quick look at all of them.  So we have divided activities into 2 tabs, Account and Auto-Bill.  Under account, you will see all the invoices and payments. When you click on ‘Auto-Bill’ tab, you’ll see all the auto-bills for the selected client, along with frequency of billing, next invoice date, previous invoice date, total number of invoices remaining and sent, and links for editing or deleting the auto-bill.

We do hope you find this useful. Please do let us know if there is anything that we can change or add to this feature to make it more relevant for your business.