New Trends in small businesses: An article by Anita Campbell based on U.S. census 2005 highlights the growth of Single Person Businesses at rates four to five times the population growth rate of USA during the three years beginning 2002. Looking at this data, the first and foremost question that comes to my mind is whether the new single person businesses are managed by people who earlier were employees or partners of larger units or are all of them fresh entrepreneurs. Since the growth percentage of small businesses heavily out numbers the overall population growth rate one would logically assume that a larger proportion of the new single person businesses are managed by people who were earlier attached to a larger business in one capacity or the other. Is it a sign of the larger businesses disintegrating due to desertion by skilled individuals?

What motivates people to go for self managed businesses? Obviously the freedom to work the way you like and expectations of higher returns for your skills may be the main incentives for preferring self managed business over working for or with others. Independence of working style, sole right on the returns, fewer constraints on self and familial conveniences and promises of shining are all incentives to run a self managed businesses. Despite all these lures, it is a huge decision for anyone to play solo. Of course you need to have enough confidence and skills to manage the show singly. Before you start, you should thoroughly look into the feasibility of sustaining single person businesses. Once you sport this endeavour, not only do you lose the economy of scale of a larger business, you also miss the complimentary skills that your co-workers have been providing in running a business. If you are currently part of a larger business, take a comprehensive note of every activity that goes on in running the business. You would need to run all these activities yourself. Evaluate your skills and identify areas that you may need help on. Once solo, you would be managing every aspect of the business from sales and marketing to accounting and customer support. At the risk of sounding apprehensive, I must that say that the risks are no less discouraging.

Notwithstanding the aforesaid apprehensions, entrepreneurship is on the rise which is great news. This substantiates the fact that people like to take the challenges of solo businesses head-on. Despite all the benefits of economy of scale and efficiencies of complimentary skills, larger businesses with several employees suffer from the unavoidable constraints of limited freedom and flexibility. These constraints inhibit the inherent capabilities from showing up and performing. This ultimately leads to under utilization and consequently suboptimal individual performance. Dissatisfaction and disappointment are the natural corollaries. Another human factor for the suboptimal performance of larger businesses is decidedly the growing lack of tolerance among the people working together.

The basic fabric of our economy is changing in a way that supports the survival and growth of solo businesses, and it is a symbiotic effect as these businesses support each other in a direct or indirect way. In a sense, while the freelancer community has grown multi-fold, so has the number of small projects and work items. Such small businesses cannot afford to (and do not need to) employ full time for various specialized work items that fall outside of their core competency. This is phenomenal change in the basic arrangement of workforce in our economy, giving rise to several thriving marketplaces for small slices of people’s time and equally small work items. This should also improve the business productivity of our workforce because inherently one’s productivity for one’s own business is much higher, and the marketplace for small projects and work items reduces the overall dead time.

Many service providers and small businesses have been moving away from doorknobs and paper slips to online invoicing systems. Not only do many of these systems automate invoicing and reminders, they also notch up the professional image of the service provider. While this level of automation works great for medium and large businesses, as a service provider playing solo, you need to be mindful of the perils of extreme automation on your relationship with your customers. The difference comes from the fact that in addition to the professionalism and quality of service, your business rides on your personal relationship with your customers.

For instance, say you are a yard care provider and one of your customers has some outstanding dues. You bump into this customer during a service visit and the customer apologetically tells you that the check in the mail. That night your super efficient invoicing system sends out an automatic 30 day overdue reminder to this customer. This reminder would not serve any purpose other than notching down your personal relationship with this customer. Instead of sending a reminder, another thing you could have done is added the overdue balance in next month’s invoice. Along the same lines, what would you do if there are five overdue invoices to the same customer; would you send five separate reminders, or compile them and send a single one. These are small things that have a potential to inflict big dents.

Unlike large corporations, solo service providers carry a human face to themselves, and this aspect has got to be reflected in all the communications between service providers and customers, including the invoices and reminders. If your invoicing system is making you myopically manage your invoices while jeopardizing your customer relationship, it is time to change the way you are using it, or to look for some other system. The efficiencies of extreme automation can be hurtful too. Make sure that your invoicing system helps you take a holistic perspective towards your relationship with your customers.

As some of you may have already noticed, we’ve made some changes to the site recently. If you look closely, you might have realized that we’ve officially left the beta stage and are now fully live with Simplifythis.com! It’s the easiest way to invoice your customers and get paid online.

One of the biggest changes is the new overall look and feel of the site. Hopefully, the first thing you’ll notice is that we updated our logo and branding. We’ve circled the wagons to re-assess our branding, and this new logo and overall color palate is the result! We’re very excited about it.

We’ve also removed a lot of the text on the main page in favor of a few screen clips that quickly communicate what we’re all about. Hopefully from the images below, you’ll understand that we are all about online Invoicing, Payment and Auto-billing, all of which help you Get Paid Faster.

In addition to the new look and feel of the main page, I mentioned that we are “now LIVE”. What does that mean? It means that we’ve spent a lot of time talking with many of you who’ve been using the beta, and rolling your feedback into the product. Your feedback and support has been invaluable, and we really appreciate it. However, as I’ve said in the past, the need to pay the bills has become more of a priority than continuing to offer a free service. With that in mind, we’ve now moved to a monthly subscription model, that includes a free option as well.

Of course, if you’ve been using the product during the beta program, we’ll grant you an additional 6 months of free service.

The final big piece of news that I have today is that one of the features many of you have been asking for during the beta was the ability to automatically bill your customers. As you saw above, we’re proud to announce that we’ve added an Auto-Bill feature! The feature basically lets you specify one invoice “template” for each customer that includes a set of line items, and the frequency to bill the customer. The great part about this feature is that if your customer incurs other charges during the month, these charges will be picked up and placed on the auto-bill (assuming you enter them as Unbilled Charges.) Try it out and let us know what you think.

As always, expect us to continue adding to the application as you provide feedback, and look for more new things in the coming month or two. Also, as you have questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to contact us — that’s why we’re here!

Labels: SimplifyThis.com

Thanks to everyone who took the time to provide feedback in the Beta survey we sent out not too long ago. We’ve received tons of great feedback, some of which has already made it’s way into the product.

I also wanted to let everyone know to keep your ears to the ground, because we have a pretty major update on the way, including one major feature that many of you have been asking for. I’ll keep the details under wraps for now, but expect something soon!

In the meantime, feel free to send us email if you have questions, feedback or just all around good vibes to send our way.
(photo courtesy of: net_efekt)

Labels: SimplifyThis.com

Welcome to the 20th edition of the Carnival of Home Business, hosted this week at SimplifyThis.com. My name is Sanjay Kumar and after working a number of years in the Small Business group at Microsoft, I’ve recently become an entrepreneur myself. I’m very passionate about small businesses and hope that you enjoy the carnival.

Before we jump into the contributions, I would first like to thank Pascal over at Start a Side Business for allowing us to host the Carnival of Home Business again.

For this week’s carnival, I ordered the contributions in order of both quality and relevance according to the spirit of the carnival. If you submitted more than one post, I chose your best contibution. Happy reading!

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John McCrea presents The Self-Employment Blues – 5 keys to surviving the dry spells posted at The Small Business Leap.

Vahid Chaychi presents The First Step to Start an Online Work at Home Business, presented at Weboma.com.

Terry Dean presents How to Publish a Book posted at Integrity Business Blog by Terry Dean.

Debra Moorhead presents Manager of Life posted at Debra Moorhead.com.

Ispf presents The Pros and Cons of Being a “Weekend” Entrepreneur posted at Grad Money Matters

Joshua Dorkin presents Gain User Trust with a Privacy Policy on your Website posted at Time For Blogging.

Matthew Paulson presents How to Not Make Money Online posted at Getting Green.

Alan Torres presents Choosing a Self-Help “Guru”, Site or Program, presented at Made to Be Great.

Susan Velez presents Leveraging your time, presented at The Secret To Life.

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Sign up for our beta at SimplifyThis.com
(Photo courtesy of ptessier)

Labels: Carnivals

First off, let me just say that we’ve been overwhelmed by the initial response to our public beta! Not only has the buzz been big, but the overall interest from the business community has been very promising as well.

Anytime you launch something that spans the tech and business boundary, you have lots of people lurking around checking things out that never intend to actually use the software, and that’s fine. It’s part of the game, and we expect a fair amount of that. But what was truly impressive was the sheer amount of sign ups and real usage of the application in the first week-and-a-half that we were live. As you can imagine, I’m not going to open the proverbial kimono on the actual numbers, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

I should also point out that we’ve received a number of good pieces of feedback, some of which we will be rolling into upgrades of the application and some that we will be implementing in parallel, outside of the application. One such piece of feedback that we’ve received loud and clear is that we need an Affiliate program. We couldn’t agree more! Over the next few weeks, we will be doing some work to make this a reality, so be on the look out.

Until then, keep sending us feedback and suggestions on how to make SimplifyThis.com the best online invoicing and payment application on the planet.

Sign up for our beta at SimplifyThis.com

Labels: SimplifyThis.com

I’m not often surprised, but when I found this video tour of the SimplifyThis.com application, I have to say, I was quite astounded!

Molly over at DemoGirl.com spent some time going through the application and did a great job showing off the application. Definitely take a look when you get a chance.

Labels: SimplifyThis.com

If you’ve been following along over the past few months, you know that we’ve been hard at work making SimplifyThis.com the BEST invoicing and payment web-based application on the planet.
I’m happy to announce that we’re now ready to launch the FREE SimplifyThis.com trial program!

SimplifyThis.com is an intuitive, web-based application that lets you easily invoice your clients and get paid faster online. It’s specifically designed for small businesses, independent professionals, and service providers who want to free themselves from complex accounting software, so there will be no more forgotten invoices, no software to install and no help manuals to read. Best of all, since SimplifyThis.com is a web-based application, you can use it from home, from the library, or from any other computer on the internet.

Sign up for the FREE Trial and be a part of the revolution!

Welcome to the Feb 19th Edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists! Let me first thank Jay for allowing me to host the carnival this week, even as the carnival begins to undergo some changes. Jay has been pretty outspoken about wanting to bring the carnival content back to it’s quality roots, and I’ve done my best this week to ensure that the content is as solid as possible, having included less than half of the entries submitted due to relevancy, lack of original content, etc. Hopefully I haven’t offended anyone, but please understand that our goal is to make the carnival highly desirable and packed with quality content.

Before I present the carnival, I hope you’ll allow me a minute to introduce myself. My name is Sanjay Kumar, co-founder of Simplifythis.com. Simplifythis.com is a new online web application for small companies to easily invoice and receive payments electronically. Talk about enabling capitalism!

Ok, so with that short introduction, and without further delay, I present this week’s carnival:

Jack Yoest presents Exxon and Global Warming and Capitalism posted at Reasoned Audacity.

Bob Vineyard of InsureBlog fame chimes in with a post about what happens when your insurance company has to pay claims that aren’t even covered. Bob reports that, sometimes it means they stop selling insurance in your state, reducing your choice and (potentially) increasing your costs.

John Ingrisano presents Mid-winter Reading for the SBO posted at The Freestyle Entrepreneur.

Charles H. Green presents Seductive Statistics posted at Trust Matters, where he posits that the problem with Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer is that the data and conclusions only represent second-order indicators — and most companies, in trying to measure trust, will systematically destroy it.

Leon Gettler presents Is 2007 the year to prick the CEO pay balloon? posted at Sox First.

Kevin Hillstrom presents 6 In 10 E-Mail Campaigns Compete On Price? posted at The MineThatData Blog

Joe Kristan presents It’s Not Always a Tax Problem posted at Roth & Company Tax Update.

James Hamilton presents The market reads Bernanke’s lips posted at Econbrowser.

Michael K. Dawson presents Profiting From Companies That Sell What China Wants posted at Breaking the Shackles of the 9 to 5 by The Time & Money Group.

David E. presents Debt – A Personal Finance Crisis Emerges posted at Worldwide Success.

Carmine Coyote presents Start Practicing “Conscious Incompetence”, posted at Slow Leadership

Jordan J. Ballor presents Managing Manure posted at Acton Institute PowerBlog.

David Foster presents The Railroad Renaissance Continues posted at Photon Courier

Dan Melson presents Real Estate: General Education versus Specific Expertise posted at Searchlight Crusade.

Asif presents Special Dividends posted at SINLetter.

Wenchypoo presents War on the War on the Middle Class posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Michelle Cramer presents Is Your Business Online Yet? posted at The Small Business Buzz.

David Maister presents A Case Study in Professional Ethics posted at Passion, People and Principles.

Rich presents WWYD: Helping the Less Fortunate posted at Queercents.

Rob May presents the thought provoking Business and Bullshit, posted at Business Pundit

Wayne Hurlbert presents Entrepreneurship: Overcoming your Fears, posted at Blog Business World

McKee Stewart presents When Do Good Firms Go Bad, posted at The Boring Made Dull.

With that, we conclude this week’s carnival. Again, if your post did not make it in this week, feel free to submit something again next week, but please be sure that it is on-topic. Ask yourself how your post fits into the broad category of capitalism. Next week, Jay will be hosting the carnival himself. Check the COTC site for more information.

Labels: Carnivals

As a reminder, the Simplifythis.com blog will be hosting the Carnival of the Capitalists on Feb 19. Please be sure to submit your qualified posts by 3pm on Feb 18th. Also, be sure to check out this week’s edition of the Carnival, posted at TamsPalm.