We still have space open for our 3rd Website Makeover Event being held at our offices in Waltham.  Come see our most recent round of FREE website makeovers!

Please register

HERE.

The feedback for last month's Small Business Makeover Event was so positive we are making them a regular thing.  And we are making them even BETTER.

We are cutting out the boring time listening to me ramble on and doing MORE MAKEOVERS of YOUR websites.

Don’t be left out! Jump on the bandwagon before it’s too late.

To register for our August 19th Event at our office in Waltham click here.

Here are some of the makeovers from the last event:

Mark the date—on July 21 at 4pm, Super Webomatic will be hosting a small business website makeover event!  During the event, CEO Chris Merrill will talk about what your website needs to have in order to generate leads and increase the vitality of your small business.  The session will focus on the importance of website usability, as well as the other components that your site needs to be a lead-generating machine.  Three lucky attendees who are chosen by Super Webomatic will have their existing websites made over, “Webomatic style,” and they’ll be revealed during the actual event.

If you’ve been thinking about improving or creating a website but are unsure what features it needs to be a worthwhile business tool, this event is for you.  Chris Merrill will lead the discussion, helping small business owners make progress online by fusing his joint knowledge of entrepreneurship and web based business strategies.

There’ll be pizza and beer, not to mention lots of valuable money-making conversation to help you improve your business— all before the work day ends!  Sign up via the link below to reserve your free spot; don’t procrastinate because space is limited!

http://webomatic.eventbrite.com/

Kevin Ohashi from Mo.com and I chatted a few weeks ago about starting up Web-O-Matic and the interview is live on their site.

Mo.com is a site focused on interviewing all types of business owners and entrepreneurs.  You can read the interview here.

Twice this week I was asked about what I have used in the past for a business plan, so I figured I would post exactly what I told them.  Both of the people who I spoke to are in the early stages of planning their idea and would be funding the company themselves or with friends, family, and fools.  

Having wasted hours and hours over the years writing long complex business plans I finally found a format that is super effective.  Most of the people I work with are usually creating a formal business plan becuase they feel it is part of the process for starting a company.  What I have learned is that the principal value in the exercise is to force you to think through the core elements of a viable functioning business and organize your thoughts so others can understand your vision.

I found this structure 2 years ago from Guy Kawasaki and it is more of an extended Executive Summary.  The basic elements are below, and should only be a few paragraphs.

1. The Grab
2. The Problem
3. The Solution
4. The Opportunity
5. Competitive Advantage
6. The Model
7. The Team
8. The Promise
9. The Ask

When it comes to hiring, small businesses face all kinds of challenges. The first challenge is finding the time. Developing job descriptions, sourcing candidates, and interviewing prospects are time consuming tasks, and they typically require input from everyone in the organization.  Secondly, hiring is expensive. If you go with a recruiter, they will charge a steep percentage of the starting salary.  If you work on finding candidates on your own, you’ve got the costs associated with your team's time.  Time is money, and you’ve got the double edged sword of the actual monetary cost of time, along with the soft cost of  lost productivity.  

The most obvious challenge when hiring, of course, is finding the right fit for your new company.  Out of the gate, many organizations don’t have a great sense of themselves, their philosophies, or the values that comprise their overall culture.  It isn't easy to find candidates who will fit in with a company’s culture and philosophy when those things are being developed.  To make things even more fun, the interview game is challenging by nature.  Everyone is on their best behavior and presenting themselves to impress.  We've all seen situations where a poor candidate is somehow able to say "all the right things".  It’s easy to be blinded your desire to find someone quickly, and to end up making the wrong hire.  I've seen firsthand the negative impact that a bad hire can have on companies of all sizes.  In general, the younger and smaller the company, the bigger the impact, and longer the recovery takes...
 
Friends of ours over at HireEQ have come up with a way to help small/mid-size businesses overcome these challenges.  They provide an outsourced recruitment solution, and leverage their own platform, and proprietary business processes, to provide all the benefits of an outsourced relationship at an affordable price.  Basically, they take care of the time intensive tasks for you and help you find (and hire) the right people for your open positions.

Where HireEQ really shines is in their ability to find the right fit.  HireEQ is made up of organizational development experts (not your typical “recruiters”) who understand people, business, and cultures.  I’ve actually seen their experts help companies to develop their culture, vision, and identity in previous lives.  They know how to weed through the bull, and help businesses find good people.  While hiring the wrong person can have an incredibly negative impact on a new company, hiring the right person can move a company forward faster than anything else.  I only wish they were around 10 years ago J

I read an article the other day titled "How Startups are Using Social Media for Real Results" as it made its way around the social media circuits.  I actually picked it up directly on Mashable and my first impression was that "It's all over Facebook and Twitter, so why bother blogging about it?".  Then I realized that it would probably be most useful to those not necessarily monitoring those channels...  

So anyway, here it is.  It covers both standard and non-standard ways to use Social Media, and it shows some interesting trends and options.  It also brings up some items that I covered in an earlier post related to startups leveraging services like Dropbox, Google Docs, and a variety of other tools.  At any rate, it is definitely worth a read if you didn't already pick it up as a Facebook post or a retweet.

I can't even begin to tell you how helpful this blog post on Quicksprout by guest blogger and attorney Scott Walker is about the differences between LLC, S-corp, C-corp are.  I have been through this conversation MANY times and still find myself questioning the right structure.  In addition to protecting your ass, choosing the right structure can have implications on partnerships, taxes, raising capital and liquidity events. 

If you have any questions or concerns, PAY SOMEONE WHO KNOWS.  Once you have chosen your corporate structure, an easy and cost effective way to setup the entity is through an online filing company like Filings Made Easy.

I was doing some research recently and came across John Maeda’s site lawsofsimplicity.com.  I had read the book a while back, and unfortunately it looks like the project has fallen off a bit since he took over at RISD.  Regardless, John Maeda is one of the more interesting designers I’ve come across and I love his perspective on things.

He made a statement in an interview about a year ago which has really stuck with me.   It actually is an idea of Roger Martin’s related to Opposable Minds, but that will really get me off on a tangent…  To paraphrase, Maeda was saying that he uses the creative side of the brain to develop an idea, and then uses the logical side of the brain when he needs to make what he is doing understandable... “Brain Surfing” of a sort between the left and right sides of the brain. 

That idea can be interpreted in all kinds of ways, across all kinds of fields (when you really think about it),  depending on the accepted ideas of logic and creativity within a field.  Historically, my situations lend to coming up with a "creative" way to do something, and then trying to put my ideas into a logical, understandable, format so that others can do the same thing, consistently, and easily.  These days, the statement comes to mind as I work on creating functional websites.

It is a given that a website needs to look good.  It’s only logical right?  I think the idea of creativity is often incorrectly reduced to the idea of aesthetics.  People think that the creative’s only job is to make the site look good.  That really isn’t the case anymore.  Most people think of the web design process as coming up with a site that looks good, and then adding functionality (calls to action, user access, support information, etc.).  At the end of the day, your web site needs to do something (get people to call you, provide a service, etc.), and that is where the design process should start.

My point is that the creative process of designing a web sites includes figuring out exactly what a site should do, and how to fit it into a site (a site, not a page) so that it looks good.  Then the logical process is figuring out how to get your ideas to make sense to others… To get them to understand what you want them to do.  You should be bouncing back and forth, saying to yourself, this looks great, but how will it be interpreted?  Does it get my point across?  Will the visitor know what I’m trying to get them to do or am I confusing them?  The definition of creativity within the web design field is changing as online marketing strategies and social media outlets grow and change.  As the definitions and fields change, don’t forget to use your brain… both sides of it… ;-)

Things could not be crazier here at Web-O-Matic.  Not only are we preparing to go live with our new website development application to manage our entire process for creating websites, we are going through a full re-design of our own Super Web-O-Matic website.  Over the last couple of months we realized what we really love about the Web-O-Matic model; it keeps us working with amazing small business owners.  With that in mind we decided to focus the company and the new site not on the website designs, but more on the small businesses, crazy people that run them, and stories of how we have helped them.

Here is where we are:

Richard Banfield hand sketched the idea for our site. He kept some of the existing elements (Logo / 50s Retro look) but really tried to give us more personality.



By some miracle, Fresh Tilled Soil's AMAZING designer Kristy had some time to work with us and mock-up RIchard's sketch.  It's just a start but here is a sneak peek.  I had to pretend to need something in the conference room just so I could look over her shoulder to get a glimpse.



Apparently I am more fun to look at animated, as we are in the process of having our team pictures turned into cartoons to match up with the site.  I plan on using the cartoon image for everything moving forward. Even my license.

NEXT STEP - As we continue with the design of the site, we will start organizing our content.  Never a fun task, once we get going I will share how we are doing it.