Developing my customer proposition

As a small business owner it can be a challenge developing a customer proposition, as the easy answer is - we want everyone’s business. Personally I have decided that I want to focus on SMEs and in reality it is mostly the SEs that I can offer the most benefit to.

In order to be a viable option to this group, low cost solutions is a key point. Previously I have worked for a business that offers its services to small businesses at £86 an hour. The result is that many of the small businesses don't have any work done on their sites.

Taking this part of the customer proposition there are a number of my internal processes that need to be managed in order to maintain low cost – ie production, or in my case development. The best way to keep this cheap at the moment is off-shore. It is very difficult to compete with the resources offered from other parts of the world. With a strong pound it means good value resources can be acquired in the likes of India, Eastern Europe or Mexico.

Developing a virtual team is relatively easy these days and the internet offers access to a wealth of developers and businesses across the world. The use of business tools is vital to keep things on track. Recommended tool include:

1. Collaboration area. This is somewhere to capture all your project information. Emails are ok, but if you have more than a couple of people working the project it can quickly get out of control. People missed from emails, information captured in emails but no where else. An online site allows all the information to be stored in one place and searched at a later stage. See my previous notes on Google site.
2. Messenger service. Skype or MSN Messenger a quick and easy ways to communicate with team members. Quick questions are fine, don't try to hold long conversations though. People don't type that quickly and creativity is best done in a call.
3. VOIP - Small businesses can easily afford access to VOIP services and they provide cheap calls to all parts of the world. If you want really cheap ie free, get a headset and use skype. The people you are working with will need the same system.
4. Screen sharing - Have you ever had that feeling that someone isn't seeing what you are when you are trying to explain something over the phone. "Its next to the green circle" " What this red line?" "No, below the redline" " What the picture?" "No, to the ....." sound familiar. For a small fee per month you can remove these issues with a screen sharing application. GoTo Meeting is relatively cheap and can remove hours of "No, below that".

So now I have my team based in 3 different locations it doesn't cost the earth to communicate with them. The operations side of the business is run with cost in mind allowing me to deliver great value services at prices designed for SMEs.

eBusiness - Integration of websites with 3rd party applications

Recently I have spoken to two businesses that are interested in an eCommerce website. Both are established businesses running retail websites. One ecommerce website was more successful then other but the issues were identical. Rather than integrating the websites into the necessary third party applications someone was having to copy and paste data between two systems!!!!

The first point, in both cases, was that the "Someone" was a business owner, who no doubt has far better and more important tasks to be completing on a daily basis. It no doubt felt right at the time when they made the decision, after all, it is an important task that needs to be done right. The reality is that paying yourself £60k a year to do data processing is not good use of resources.

The second is the exposure to risk that can occur with a manual task. In one case it was the payment details, so that chance of getting card details incorrect during the process are slim as the banks have numerous checks to ensure the details match up. The other was account and order creation, which could result in incorrect orders or missing details. When the numbers are small the risks are less but as a business grows the room for error increases.

eCommerce & eBusiness should be about reducing manual overheads and the automation of processes to reduce the risk of error. Ok there is the chance that something can go wrong with the software, but with good levels of testing the risks can be reduced and with log files errors can be easily traced.

This rant leads us back into the use of Kaplan and Norton's strategy map, which I will pick up next time.