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.

Ok, it’s time for an update. A lot of time has passed since my last post and I wanted to let you in on some of our progress and some changes that have happened over the past two months.

First, we have had some changes in staff at Simplifythis.com. Regrettably, Mauro Lombarda has decided to pursue other passions outside of Simplifythis.com. We very much appreciate his significant contributions in helping to bootstrap Simplifythis.com and wish him the best of luck in his new endeavors. Mauro’s sense of humor, spirited debates and of course, his Italian cooking skills will be missed to no end. Good luck Mauro!

To help fill the void, we’ve had a number of new folks come on board since his departure and I’m sure you will hear me talking more about them over time. The bottom line is that the Simplifythis.com team continues to be strong and is more passionate than ever about delivering a world-class application in the online invoicing and payment area.

Second, we have received a lot of very valuable feedback on the beta application and have been working very hard to address it. One of the most important pieces of feedback we’ve received is that our application needs to run in a wider variety of browsers (feedback that we knew about, but received none-the-less). To that end, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time ensuring that our application works in most of the popular browsers being used today. We still have some testing and verification to do on some browsers, but we should be able to publish a broader list of compatible browsers than ever before.

Finally, I know that many of you are chomping at the bit for us to extend the private beta beyond it’s current scope. Please be patient with us as we incorporate the feedback and move the private beta forward. I guess this is my polite way of saying: “It’ll be ready when it’s ready.”

Thanks to everyone who has been rooting for us and supporting us over the past few months.

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Labels: SimplifyThis.com

There is a very timely post over on Financial Think that we probably all need to read, and then read again. It’s about tax preparation and how not to leave money on the table by properly preparing for end of year taxes. David Stern rightfully points out that entrepreneurs are one group that under utilize CPAs, and ironically enough, they’re probably the ones that probably need help the most. It’s no secret that small business owners have a DIY mentality and that very mentality is probably what makes them great small business owners. It allows them to do more with less. In the case of taxes, however the consequences can be huge if the job is not done correctly. Leaving money on the table is better than having to pay fines, but neither is desirable.

David’s other points are pretty straightforward:

1. “Just do it.” Contact your CPA now and setup an appointment to get the ball rolling. With a little preparation, your accounting reports or box full of invoices and bills is really all you need.
2. Look broadly at your tax situation — include both personal as well as business in your planning exercises.
3. Look broadly at time. Don’t minimize your tax this year only to have to pay through the nose next year. Figure out ways to normalize your tax burden across multiple years.

In short, don’t be afraid to hire out tasks such as tax planning. Despite trying to be a jack of all trades, ask yourself if tax planning is really where you want to spend your time. Most small business owners I’ve interacted with would rather just run their businesses.

(Photo courtesy of HeyPaul)

Have you ever found yourself in the situation of trying to close a sale with a client and just when you thought you had the work in the bag, the client starts negotiating? Unfortunately, this is a fact of life: people negotiate.

I was recently on the other end of the transaction as a buyer of services when I pulled this maneuver, and I was shocked at how well the contractor held his line. My wife and I were contracting with a landscape designer to put in a new garden. As you can imagine, the bottom line number was a pretty big number, at least by our standards. So we dutifully listened to the details about the bid and the different ways in which he was going to transform our garden, but at the end of the day, $40/hr for manual labor and $60 for design time adds up very quickly. I told the contractor that we were excited to get started and loved the vision he had for the space and even went so far as to ask what his schedule looked like before starting to negotiate the price. He thought he had the business in the bag, and judging by his face when I asked the question, he wasn’t expecting a price negotiation.

Here is where the lesson starts on how to successfully defend your pricing when clients question it. It sounds like a typical negotiation, but the lessons are in the responses from the contractor:

My first tact was the open-ended standard question: “What can we do about the price… it’s a little large?”, I said. He clearly anticipated the question and immediately replied with “We could do less plantings.” Ah, he hit me with the old: lets reduce price by reducing scope tact. I wasn’t buying that one.

I shot back with “Well, how about this rate? $40 for digging dirt seems like a lot…” Again, calmly, he came back with: “I strive to make sure my pricing is aggressive and if you want to bring in someone else to do the digging, that’s fine with me, but the overall job may take longer.” He stumped me again! Of course I don’t want to manage another contractor just to do the digging, and truth be told, that “digging” rate also included all the soil prep, material haul-away and obviously, the plant installation. He wasn’t buying my “$40 for a lot of digging” way of thinking.

Finally, I asked him if he would consider a cash discount — I pay cash and you charge me less money. Luckily, he bought into that one and I came out with a 9% discount.

So what were the lessons? First, be prepared for this question and all of it’s variations. Second, remain calm and answer the challenges rationally using you prepared statements. Third, be flexible and “have something to give”. This contractor gave me options for reducing the price (such as bringing in my own “digger” and/or paying cash) and that’s one thing that helped him win the job. One of the only times you should be prepared to lower your prices is if you know you are coming in high relative to other bids and you need the work.

(Photo courtesy of maveric2003)

I thought it would be good to showcase some of the other great small business blogs out there that we regularly read and admire. Congrats to all of the great content being generated out there.

• Church of the Customer Blog
  
• Small Business Unplugged
• Small Business Trends
• Businesspundit
• Bizinformer
• Duct Tape Marketing

Are there other small business blogs that you regularly read and get a lot of good, useful information from? Leave a comment and let us know about them.

Bootstrapping. It’s hard, but we all know how to get things done. When money is tight, funding is impossible and equity won’t due, sometimes you have to resort to alternative means. Here is a great article from the WSJ on how businesses are bartering to get the stuff they need. From equipment to services, people are willing to barter:

Online Sites Promote The Art of the Barter

What I find incredible is the level of trust that people have, especially in the services realm. How can you be sure that if you barter services for goods, that you’ll actually realize the services from the second party? A lot of times, I can’t get a contractor to do work for real money!

(Photo courtesy of Nate Steiner)

Refreshing, isn’t it? You may have noticed our new updated look and additional content about SimplifyThis. These changes should signal to you that we are a few weeks away from giving more people a taste of the future of software that helps you manage your small business.

While we still have a number of tricks up our sleeves, the SimplifyThis home page spells out the service with the most detail yet:

SimplifyThis is an intuitive web-based service to easily invoice your customers and get paid faster online. No more forgotten invoices, no software to install and no help manuals to read. Use this from home, from the library, or from any other computer on the internet.

Also called out are the core features and who we’re targeting with this service. Check out the details and be sure to leave your email address so we can let you know when the beta is ready.

The best part about it is that this is just the first step along the way for SimplifyThis. Keep checking back over the next few months to see what we’ve been up to…

(Photo courtesy of: RINAJO.DK)

Over the past few months, I have seen a lot of posts for new businesses about what to do, what not to do, what new technology to use and even posts about what new businesses to start right now. These are all great posts for new businesses. While some of these themes also hold true for existing businesses, one area that seems to be neglected is how existing businesses should take advantage of new technologies.

Whether it’s new invoicing software, a reporting solution or even GPS-enabled cell phones for your employees, the technology has to make sense from both a usefulness, as well as a cost and return perspective. Here is a common-sense guide to making sure you are taking advantage of the right new technologies and whether or not they make sense for your business.

Identify the Need. It should go without saying that if you don’t need a piece of new technology to meet some business requirement, you probably should stick to watching the bottom line and not be on the lookout for cool stuff to buy. Make sure you’re addressing business problems or ways to improve productivity. It may be ok to boost employee morale with a technology upgrade, but buying it just because it’s the new thing should not be your agenda.

Evaluate the Options and Costs. Just as if you were getting multiple bids for a service, you should also be evaluating all possible options to meeting the need you identified in step 1. Generally, for any piece of technology you are looking to buy, there are competitors with different offerings covering a variety of price points. Although the most cost effective option is usually appealing, consider how it will hold up over the longer term, what trends on the horizon may make it obsolete, or whether or not it will limit your own ability to grow without serious upgrade. Pick technology that gives you a little room to grow, but not something so fully featured that you wind up overpaying for it. At this point, it also makes sense to start looking at your expected return on the investment.

Decide and Implement the Technology. Making the decision to acquire the technology cannot be an emotional decision, as with all business decisions. It should be made carefully considering the need, options, cost and expected return.

Measure the Return. Making the decision to procure a new technology is only the first step. Making sure that once you get the technology in-house, that employees embrace it and help you realize your return is paramount to the technology making sense in the first place.

The Carnival of Business is up at the MyMoneyForest Blog. Be sure to check it out!

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Welcome to the 10th edition of the Carnival of Home Business, hosted this week at SimplifyThis. 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.
I would like to thank Pascal over at Start a Side Business for starting the Carnival of Home Business and allowing me to host it this week. Be sure to visit his site on Nov. 21 for the 11th edition of the Carnival of Home Business covering “What free resources can you use for advertising your home business”. If you wish to contribute to this edition of the carnival, you can submit your post using the standard submission page.

For this week’s carnival, I divided up the submissions into four rough categories, based on the content of each post: Business, Adsense/Monetizing Blogs, Advise and finally the Other category. Happy reading!

Business

Michelle Cramer chimes in with two great articles this week: Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Revitalize Your Stagnant Business. Both are posted at The Small Business Buzz.

Kevin contributed a cool article on Working From Home: the Pros and Cons, posted on his Site Help Center blog.

Shannon Herod talks about getting down to business though planning in Turning a business into a business. You can find Shannon’s blog at: Internet Marketing.

Kim tells us what it really means to work from home in: Small Business Pitfalls, posted at Blogfabulous.

Joe Caterisano from help with everything contributes a post about the basics of eBay selling in: Make $20 an hour on eBay.

Adsense / Monetizing Blogs

Phil of Phil for Humanity posts about an interesting Adsense effect he is seeing when his blog is linked from a carnival vs. another high traffic site. See: Web 2.0 versus AdSense for the discussion.

Sushith Mundayadan presents Reasons For Getting Irrelevant Or Off-targeted Google Adsense Ads And How To Stop Them posted at Tips To Make Money Online.
In his post, Sushith offers a few Reasons that you may be getting off-targeted Adsense ads and some tips to stop them from appearing on your site.

Sarakastic of The Fibromyalgia Experiment is not exactly “in love” with Blogitive, but shares his thoughts about this advertising program in his Blogitive Review.

Azmi Mufti tells us about his Adsense income with: Finally! My $1,400+ Payment for October from AdSense, posted at Azmi M.

Advice

James D. Brausch presents Are You Being A Good Guy Or A Plain Old Procrastinator posted at jamesbrausch.com.

Other

Barry Welford talks about how the internet growth has slowed down to a mere 25% growth and ponders the growth rate of Mobile web v.s. the regular web in: 100 Million Websites – How Many To Go?, posted at StayGoLinks.

(Photo courtesy of ptessier)