What’s the difference between a business and a hobby?

The way I see it, you run a hobby for FUN and a business for PROFIT. Let me ask which you have? Now there are plenty of people who can survive quite well with a hobby but if they think they have a business then they’re fooling themselves. Sadly I think most smaller IT providers delude themselves into thinking they are running a business when they in fact simply enjoy fiddling with the technology. In other words they have a hobby. Like I said, there is nothing wrong with having a hobby but don’t confuse it with a business.

So, if you want to run a business then you must be in the business of making PROFIT. The next question is what can you define as PROFIT? Put simply, it is income less expenses, nothing more. Profit can mean more time for you family, it can mean a better lifestyle but generally the easier measure of profit is in dollar terms. Unless you are generating more INCOME from your business than it is COSTING you then you are not making PROFIT. Take a cold hard look at how many hours you are investing in running your business, are you getting a return for this? If you simply dismiss that as ‘part of the environment’ I’m sorry to tell you that you are engaged in a hobby not a business. A true business person would never dismiss extended hours as ‘part of the environment’, they would be making sure they PROFIT on this time. If you aren’t making PROFIT then you have two choices, change the way that you run your business or get out.

Making PROFIT can require some hard choices at times and means that you always need to remain focused on the goal of making more PROFIT. This doesn’t mean having greater revenue, it doesn’t mean having more customers or more employees, it means GREATER INCOME and LOWER EXPENSES. Again, many people get fooled into think higher revenue means greater PROFIT but is doesn’t. The aim is to make the most INCOME with the least OUTLAY, i.e. the greatest PROFIT.

What’s the first step to generating more PROFIT? Again, simple – measurement. If you don’t know how much you are earning or spending then how are you ever going to determine whether you are making a PROFIT? How does your results compare to last year? Which are you most profitable (again NOT highest revenue) customers? Where are most of your expenses? If you can’t answer these basic questions at any time, then I’m sorry to say you don’t have a business.

If you want to have a business rather than a hobby then you have to focus on PROFIT. This can take some getting used to and can reveal some cold facts that people may have previously chosen to ignore. The first step in focusing on PROFIT is to measure it.

The fact is that the business landscape has changed and tougher times lay ahead. If you want to guaranteed your survival then ask yourself whether you are focused on PROFIT or just getting a buzz from technology?

The little device set to change the world

Now kids, July 11 is only 6 more sleeps. Then you’ll be able to join the rest of the “in” crowd and go out and “mortgage” an Apple iPhone. For those of us “uncool” enough not to line up at our local store for an iPhone there is little doubt that we will be endlessly regaled by those having shelled out for the device about how “cool” they are, how “fantastic” they are, how “amazing” they are… and so on and so on, “dude”.

In all seriousness, these devices ARE going to change the current comfortable world of IT that most techie’s live in. Firstly, techie’s are going to have to figure out how to get the iPhone sync’ing with Exchange server pretty darn quick because by Monday July 14 the boss is going to expect to be receiving emails on the iPhone they bought on Friday July 11! Techie’s are also going to need to work out how to use all the functions the boss saw in the iPhone video without actually being allowed to use the device because once the boss has one of these sexy things in their hands they are never going to want to let it go (or so Apple says).

Now, the iPhone is far from perfect and has a number of disappointments that are coming to light. I have also heard that the iPhone doesn’t have speed dialling! C’mon, that can’t be true can it? Even a 10 year old Nokia has speed dialling. One of the biggest issues has been the support for data traffic from our local telco’s here in Australia. Optus is the latest to release its pricing but there is plenty of good local Aussie information at the SMH site, which in itself highlights why this product will revolutionize the market (imagine a whole section dedicated simply to one product in a major metropolitan online newspaper!).

It doesn’t matter if the iPhone is expensive to buy, it doesn’t matter if it is going to be expensive to run, it doesn’t matter if it has security issues, as I have heard so many people say of late – “I want it”. When was the last time you heard people say that about Microsoft technology? Certainly not about Vista eh? But that’s another story. What it does highlight is the fact that technology is fast becoming a commodity and fast being driven by the consumer not business market. Consumer’s are embracing technology faster than business. Business simply want things to stay the same for as long as possible, they don’t like change. Yet they WILL BE dragged kicking and screaming forwards as consumers infiltrate their products into businesses they are involved with. As I said previously, case in point, techie’s get ready to have those iPhone’s sync’ing with corporate emails by Monday July 14.

Sure, it doesn’t make sense but then what does in a consumer’s mind these days? If you want to survive in the technology field you have to adapt to what is driving your customers. Like it or not, after Friday 11 July the world in Australia is going to be a different place and you can either embrace it as an opportunity or be road kill as your customers stampede around you to have “what they want”.

PC-Cillian and Windows default profile

Just updated a stand alone machine to Trend Micro PC-Cillian Internet Security 2008 and when I logged it in I got a message saying there were not enough system resources and I would be logged in with the default profile. Huh? Stand alone machine, not enough resources? My ar@#! A reboot didn’t fix the problem so it was off to Google.

The result was this article:

http://support.antivirus.co.uk/trendmicro/kbresolution.jsp?hmid=46365&appId=11

which basically tells you that PC-Cillian is a resource hog and you need to make some registry changes to allow more page pooled memory. The above article contains a link to a Microsoft KB article that did the trick for me.

It seems that a few other people are getting the same problem now. Phew, it wasn’t me after all!

I was wrong – again

In a previous post I posed the possibility that there was missing step in the migration of Companyweb from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008. After repeating the process again it appears that it does work as laid out in the recommended migration process.

Interestingly, when I repeated the process using an untouched version of SBS 2003 Companyweb I actually received a timeout during the Application creation stage. After running the process again it worked as expect. Perhaps when I did my initial migration there was also some sort of timeout that I wasn’t aware of and the site creation failed to complete properly. Maybe, it had something to do with the fact that I used a demo SBS 2003 Companyweb I have. Maybe, there were some security issues I over looked on the SBS 2003 Companyweb that caused the failure of the site creation. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Yes, maybe but looks like I stuffed up (again) and the recommended migration process works as expected. Now I just have to work out what I did wrong.

Proof that emails make you stupid

I came across the following article about the Myth of Multi-tasking in which it says:

“Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

So there you have it. Actually, I commend that you take the time (don’t multi-task) and read the complete article, which simply shows how humans can’t improve their productivity by multi-tasking. In fact they make it infinitely worse.

To me the rest of the world seems to be chanting “multi-task, multi-task” but the real heroes are those that step back and say “No, I need to concentrate on one thing at a time”. They may suffer ridicule but I bet they get more done than most people.

Most emails are a waste of time

Here’s an interesting article from the NYTimes about information overload. As you can see from the above graphic most information workers waste the greatest percentage of their day on interruptions from things that aren’t urgent. Don’t forget that it isn’t just the time to look at the irrelevant material, it is also the time taken to get back to what you are doing. (Also, interestingly they spend 15% of their day looking for stuff – I’ll talk about that in the future.)

Have you ever stopped to evaluate your own productivity in relation to things like emails and mobile phones? Are you actually “using” the technology or is “using” you?

Technology should be making your life EASIER not HARDER. If it isn’t then perhaps it’s time to take control back or perhaps just ignore it for a while?

Document library discovery

When you come to Sharepoint from a files and folders background you tend to simply replicate the same structure within Sharepoint document libraries. In many cases this is probably not your best option.

Case in point. My external Sharepoint site Supportweb has a Document Library called Documents. In here you’ll find all sorts of documents I’ve created and uploaded. Many are available for free but there is also a whole swag that are only available to subscribers. Initially, when I started uploading to the document library I created a whole lot of sub-folders and placed the relevant documents in these folders. For example, I had folders for Exchange, SBS and so on.

Now the problem was when I wanted to find a document that was about Exchange server on SBS. Was it in the Exchange Folder or the SBS folder? Also, people more versed in Sharepoint than me suggest that the best idea with document libraries is to dump everything into a single location (no sub-folders) and then use Sharepoint’s in built filtering capability to find what you are looking for.

Now this made a lot of sense to me so I was considering relocating all my documents from their sub-folders to the top level folder. This wasn’t going to be an easy task and may have involved re-assigning the rights to each document again. BUT I found a better way!

I simply created a new Sharepoint view called Complete that displayed all the files, even those from sub-folders in a single page! I then made that view the default view so it is what you see when you first enter the document library now. The original All documents view is still there (simply change the view name in the top right of the Documents library and change the view to All documents to see how it used to be).

How easy was that? Geeze, I love Sharepoint. No re-keying, moving files and so on. Simply create a new view of your data. I added an additional column to the entries so that the documents can easily be sorted by using Sharepoint (just click on the column heading to bring up the filtering options for that column). Even updating the records was a piece of cake. I simply changed the view to Datasheet view (like Excel) changed the records for that column and returned to the Standard view. Geeze, I love Sharepoint!

So image a Sharepoint document library like a phone book, full of data. If you create a view of this phone book (say just family and friends) everything except the records matching your criteria are not displayed. The records are still there in the phone book but you don’t need to see them. Now image you create another view for all your business contacts. You can easily swap between views to display exactly what you need without the need to see irrelevant data. Bottom line is that phone book data is always there. Whenever you update or change something, the record in the phone book also gets changed. One set of data but many ways to view the data. You can even have different views for different people, but the underlying data remains the same.

So if you are thinking about creating folders underneath a document library don’t bother, just dump all the data into the one location and use filtering to find what you want. If you already have a document library that is full of sub-folders, create a new that allows you to view all the files together without sub-folders. Again, same data, different view.

Geeze I love Sharepoint!