Brandon Darling

If you’re a business owner, you have the temptation to stay in “entrepreneur” mode.  Granted, there is a time and a place where you scrap for every last resource – where you squeeze pennies until they bleed quarters.  It’s painful – but it’s also a little fun.  The problem is that real businesses don’t have to scrimp and save.  Real owners don’t work 120 hour weeks.  The whole point of being a business owner was to work four hours a week and play golf, right?

You are in your own way.  As a business owner, you “know” the biz better than anyone, right?  The problem is, you need to be a teacher, not a do-er.  If you are doing things yourself, then you’ll never make it.  You have to teach others to think like you.  That’s hard.  It’s tough.  It will fail more times than it succeeds.  But it is the only path to success.

The first thing you have to do as a business owner is establish what your time is worth.  If you can’t put a number on what an hour of your time is worth, then your time is worthless.  And subsequently, YOU are worthless.

Most business owners are worth between $500-$1500 per hour.  In one hour, most business people can “make” or create at least that much money.  If you can’t – rethink your status as a business owner.

Once you have this number, stack this against everything else that you do.  Do you enter data into Quickbooks?  Do you do payroll?  Do you track inventory?  Create schedules?  If you do – you’re wasting THOUSANDS of dollars every month.  You can get software tools to automate all those things.  You can get virtual assistants (look into it) that will do all your tedious work for a few dollars per hour.  Yes, it’s a cost.  But what is the cost of YOU doing all the mundane, little things?  TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS.

You are the visionary – the entrepreneur.  You have an energy and a tolerance for risk that is rare.  Not everyone can do what you do.  So stop doing what everyone else does.  GO BE THE CHAMPION.  Leave the little details to people who can get it done – to people who are a few dollars per hour.

I’ll say it again, because it’s worth repeating:  If you can’t put a number on your time, then your time is worthless.

Once you have the number, stack that against the rate of your attorney, accountant, IT guy, insurance agent, etc.  If what they charge is LESS than what your time is worth, let them do the work and forget about the rest.  Double check their work with a third party.  If they mess up, fire them.  If they work well, let them do their job.

Then YOU go do YOURS.

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Utilities are after the holy grail of service: the Smart Grid.  Think wireless meter reading of electrical, gas, and water usage.  No more meter “mis-reads,” no more cost of meter readers, and up-to-the minute market pricing adjustments for customers.

Hopefully it all reduces costs.  The point is that the wireless market is still growing.  And – the carriers (Verizon, AT&T) aren’t the only game in town.

Read – WiFi is still, and will continue to be, the dominant technology for connecting devices wirelessly.  No one really wants to have a provider (Verizon, AT&T) having control over their thermostat, TV, fridge, or computers.

Granted, 3G/4G and cell-based wireless technologies have their place.  But WiFi is here – and here to stay.

If you have not considered multiple monitors for your computer desktops, I urge you to reconsider.  The evidence is clear: read this article from the WSJ citing nearly a 50% increase in productivity with larger, or multiple monitors.

Take note – increasing productivity can be defined as “reducing the time it takes to complete a task or set of tasks.”  This is what you must remember.

Also, have a look at GridMove – this program can help you “split up” your screen in to regions, so that program windows will align to a pre-defined “grid” or layout.  It helps with widescreen monitors – you can easily push your email into the left side of the screen and your browser into the right.  No more “right-click taskbar, align vertical” and “whoops, they swapped positions.”

This is a excerpt from an article in a hospitality magazine.  It is focused on the hotel industry, but I’ll be you’ll find some points that are terribly familiar and uncomfortable for you and your business.

To win in 2009, you will need your hotel’s website to contribute to your reservations production. So,  here is a countdown of the Top Ten Tip-Offs that your hotel website needs attention. It’s time to seek advice from a hotel Internet Specialist, when:
10…You do a generic search and can’t even find your own website.

9…People see your website and can’t tell if your hotel is in Albany, NY or Albania.

8…That template you used to make your site, looked good until you published it.

7…Your home page takes longer to load than “Gone With The Wind”.

6…People click a link on your site and nothing happens.

5…People see your website and assume it was designed by Picasso.

4…People need a GPS device to navigate your super cool website.

3…You think Meta Tag is a cool game kids play in elementary school.

2…Your site is so out-of-date, the photos still feature shag carpeting.

And Number 1…
You’re the owner and, even you, don’t refer people to your website.

You probably never heard this countdown on Letterman, but if he developed websites, he might have used it. These were obviously meant to be funny, but if any of these situations strike a chord, it’s not a funny matter. Many of these problems actually exist.

Some things in life are self-explanatory and other things take some time to understand and implement. Given enough time and specific interest, any general manager or hotel owner can learn to develop and implement a workable Internet marketing program. Of course, finding the time and developing the interest most often prevents this from happening. During hard economic times like this, time is not our friend. Loss of time could mean loss of opportunity.

It’s a common scenario to hear “we can do that ourselves” and the usual response is “of course, you can”, but, in reality, it rarely happens. The problem is that the road to success is littered with good intentions; that road can be bumpy and twisting, but you need to get to the success end of the road, as quickly as possible.

It All Has a Familiar Ring to It

Whenever I think about this subject, I’m reminded of one of my favorite stories about the man who has a squeak on his home staircase. Every day he comes home, his wife takes the opportunity to remind him that he said he would fix it. Running out of time, he hires a carpenter just to get it done and finally bring some quiet to his household.

The carpenter arrives, walks up then down the stairs, takes out his hammer, and quickly hammers in a nail to quiet the noise. He then hands his bill to the man who promptly looks at it and says “$60???, all you did was hammer in a nail! I could have done that myself.” Then as he looks closer, the bill says “hammer in a nail – $2; knowing where to put the nail – $58.

Many times, it’s more cost-effective to put tasks in the hands of an expert to get things done, quickly and properly. The time and efficiency factor looms big in the decision to collaborate with a specialist. Can you do these things yourself? Sure, but will you?

What Kind of Help Can you Get?

The difference between hotel website design and website development lies primarily in the way one views the use of the Internet. For a long time, the focus was directed towards simply having a presence on the Net; many people knew that it was a smart thing to do, but most of us had no clue as to what the potential might be.
As the popularity of using the Internet to research and book hotels increased, more hotels discovered the virtues of search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. In many cases, this was the total extent of their Internet marketing programs…until now!

Today, a good Internet marketing program includes site market positioning, revenue management, search engine regional marketing, link strategy, package marketing, promotion creation, email promotion mailings, guest comment referrals, website design optimization, and more. Your collaboration with an Internet specialist should go far beyond simply having a website designed and published.

Marketing your hotel on the Internet is a complete process; it begins as a collaborative effort with an Internet specialist to position your hotel within the marketplace. Work with a specialist to develop a complete marketing program for the Internet.

Only one question remains, can you do it yourself? Of course you can, but will you and how long will it take?

Disk-based cartridge media is ideal for backup.  You can preserve the idea of “changing tapes” for the speed and reliability of disk based backup.  Tandberg developed a cartridge and drive system called RDX, which has been copied by many other OEMs.

Dell, in particular, uses RDX standards for their RD1000 line of backup products.  They work well as internal storage/backup systems for servers when connected over the SATA bus.  Backups are fast and reliable.

However, ejecting the cartridge with the “soft” eject button on the drive proves to be uncooperative in my experience.

Enter the command line.  Drop to a command window (Start, Run, enter “cmd” (less the quotes) in the box and hit Enter), and issue this command:

rsm view /Tlibrary

This little utility leverages the internal Removable Storage service in Windows.  Some third-party backup systems (BackupExec) disable Removable Storage and thus this utility may not work for you.

The output of the utility will list the different “libraries” of removable storage in your system.  For most Dell systems, the RDX drive will show up as “Dell RD1000″.

Once you have this, you can issue this command:

rsm eject /LF”DELL RD1000″

This is not a typo – if you explore the rsm utility syntax, you have switches that require parameters – and in the case of this utility there are NO spaces as a matter of course.  rsm eject invokes the utility, prepares the eject command, and issues it to the LibraryFriendlynameDELL RD1000.  In short, /L defines a library to eject, the F says the next parameter will be the library “friendly name” and lastly the “DELL RD1000″ is the friendly name of the library we want to eject.

Schedule this task in the Windows task scheduler for end-of-day.  This prevents calls from the lowly droid assigned to tape changing duty from calling you because the tape is “stuck”.

You either know the value of proper time synchronization, or you don’t.  This is not a post to evangelize you about the need for accurate time-keeping.

If you have Cisco hardware (routers, switches, firewalls) you have to ensure the clock inside the unit is properly syncronized with a good time source.  If you don’t, any log files will be useless and you may have other network and authentication problems.  (Read up on Kerberos)

Here’s the short story:

On your Cisco PIX / ASA, set the following commands:

clock timezone CST -6
clock summer-time CDT recurring 2 Sun Mar 2:00 2 Sun Nov 2:00

Of course, this is applicable only to Central Time systems.  CST (Central Standard Time) is the zone where you are in the winter months, or Standard Time. (You might live in EST, MST, or PST (for the uber-dense, Eastern, Mountain, and Pacific)).

Then wet the summer-time CDT (Central Daylight Time) to recurring.  You’ll see the format of the DST (Daylight Saving Time) rules follows this format:

Week Day Month Time

Hence, DST starts the 2nd Sunday of March at 02:00 (or 2:00 AM for those who don’t read 24 hour time) and ends the 2nd Sunday of November at 02:00.

I sync our systems to NIST servers – my preference is 192.43.244.18.  There are other NTP servers available – a google search or a look at the nist.gov website will help you find NTP servers.

There are a million companies, freelancers, organizations, and other cousins of brother’s friends that will take your money to create a “website” for you.

Before you and your big britches get on the “great world wide web” with your brand new spanking “website”, spend some time considering and learning about the history of “the web”.

You know, just like you might consider getting a home inspection on that new 6000 sq. ft. Victorian that is your wife’s new squeeze.

The web, if you’ve done your research, was not created for businessmen, advertisers, entrepreneurs, moguls, successful people, meaningful people, single mothers, widowers, widows, old-maids, car dealers, or, frankly, anyone else that wants to make money.

The web was created by engineers, scientists, and mathematicians for the purpose of exchanging information about engineering, science, and math.

By pure stroke of luck, commerce came to be transacted by the same technology that now creates instant millionaires and makes google and youtube household names.

Of course, all this money didn’t come about by accident.  It came about because people who understood people and markets realized what consumers really wanted (read a bio on Bill Gates sometime).

eBay was not a success because they had a great domain name, or a fabulous web site design published by a talented programmer.  Google isn’t ubiquitous because the site is captivating or particularly interesting.  Amazon isn’t the de facto “new library” because of the Dewey Decimal system.  YouTube didn’t make a few silicon valley punks 2.2 BILLION dollars because of out-of-this-galaxy design or programming.

No.  All of these “sites” have great success for one simple reason.  The same reason THE WEB was INVENTED.

They all bring relevant content to an audience.

Look at your website.  Have others look at your website.  If it has no content and does not speak to an audience – please – do the web a favor and take it down.

“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”  Henry David Thoreau

“Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time”  Margaret Bonnano

“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better.”  Mae West

“High achievers spot rich opportunities swiftly, make big decisions quickly and move into action immediately. Follow these principles and you can make your dreams come true.”  Robert H. Schuller

“There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions”  Anais Nin

“Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth.”  Mark Twain

“The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead.”  Ann Landers

“It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick”  Dave Barry

Car sales is still the last domain of the bottom feeders.  The Ancient Greeks knew this – really.  Read this excerpt from Plato’s Republic:

“Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production to market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with him, is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?”

“Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered states they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose.”

Here’s some context.  Socrates and Adeimantus are in the throws of discussing what is needed in a city where justice is prevalent.  Socrates is making the point that if craftsmen or manufacturers have to sit in the market all day waiting for a buyer, then they are by necessity NOT making any more product.  The point made is that there are people – shrewd people – who will sit in the market ALL DAY DOING NOTHING so that when someone wants to buy, they are there to sell.  This leaves the manufacturer free to manufacture.

Look at car sales.  Car manufacturers don’t sell cars.  Dealers do.  And what do car dealers do?  Sit on their ass all day waiting for someone to walk in.  9 of 10 people who walk in are a sale.  They’re fundamentally lazy.  They prey on people.  They’ll do NOTHING until the weak come to them (because they are weak and able to do nothing else) and then using rhetoric and the poorest slight-of-hand available, get someone in a car.

Think I’m being unfair?  Watch this video about a software company that makes software for car dealerships.  In the video, the developer of the software actually comes right out and says the software shows the dealer which cars in inventory will create the most profit for the dealership.  GIVING THE CUSTOMER THE MOST VALUE FOR THEIR MONEY IS NOT THEIR JOB!!!