1. Have an exit strategy.

2. If you have a business partner, get a good buy/sell and shareholder’s agreement in place. Talk to a lawyer. Get it done right.

3. Get a good accountant and take the time to learn how accounting works. Take the time to really understand your books and how it all works, especially taxes.

4. When you hire vendors, trust them to do their job. You hired them for their expertise.

5. Don’t always go with the cheapest option, sometimes the cheapest can cost you a lot of cash down the road.

6. Document your processes like you’re going to be hit by a bus tomorrow. It’ll help if you end up selling the business later (or if you actually do get hit by a bus). You need to make it easy for someone else to do what you do.

7. Sadly, a good product will not market itself. You will need to market it. Bad marketing can ruin a good product.

8. Marketing isn’t like “Mad Men”. Be nice to people, be honest, give people the information they need to feel like they are making an informed decision.

9. Spell everything correctly. Use good grammar. Use a copywriter if your language skills are subpar, they’re worth it.

10. Explain how your product will help your customer. Do not talk about yourself and how awesome you are. Talk to your customer. Your product/service should help your customers feel more awesome.

11. If you make a mistake (and you will) be honest about what happened, apologise, promise that it won’t happen again, and then make whatever changes you need to so that it actually doesn’t happen again.

12. Be upfront about delivery dates. You will struggle with this. Everyone underestimates how long things take, especially in consulting.

13. Treat every customer like your first.

14. A bad customer can kill your business. If you can’t identify them before they sign on with you, figure out a way to have them go with a minimum of hurt feelings at the first availabile opportunity.

15. At networking events, listen more than you talk. If you think you might be talking too much, you are. Stop.

16. Get out there and meet people. If you’re an introvert (like me), I know it’s hard. Make goals for yourself – at this event, I will meet 5 new people. Find an extroverted friend who will start the introduction (that’s the hard part for me) and then let you have a conversation.

17. When you meet people, get their business cards. Enter them into a contact database (I use Highrise). Email them the day after you meet them and thank them for the connection, follow up on anything you discussed. Don’t put it off.

18. If you’re at a networking event and you meet someone interesting and say “we should go for coffee”, actually set that up! Nothing is more insincere than saying that and not following through.

19. Thank your customers regularly. Mean it.

20. You should always be doing business development, even if you’re so busy you’re not sure where you’ll find the time to fit it in.

21. When you’re marketing, don’t think in terms of numbers, think in terms of clients. For example, website traffic – you can have 5 million visitors who will never buy your stuff, or 50 visitors who will all buy your stuff. Sheer numbers of impressions will not sell your product.

22. Don’t write anything on the internet that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see. Or worse, your customers.

23. Buy the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and actually read it. That being said, don’t spend more time figuring out your productivity system than being productive.

24. If you’re sitting in your work space, not being productive but feeling like you should be there, go, do something else, come back later. Busy work isn’t productivity.

25. Set limits on how many hours you work in day. When you hit it, you’re done. Put down your work, come back tomorrow. If you leave your work in the middle of a task, it’s that much easier to get into it the next day.

26. Track your time – not in 15 minute increments, but write down what you do each day. Make sure you’re using your time wisely. Time is the most valuable resource you have.

27. Control your cash flow. Gross is not net.

28. You’re always learning, especially from your mistakes. Failure is good, it teaches you a lot.

29. Don’t burn your bridges, no matter how tempting it is. It’s a small world and you don’t know who somebody knows.

30. Don’t go outside of your business’s core competencies to make extra cash, no matter how tempting it is.

31. Be humble.

Why Edmonton? My fiancée has been admitted to the PhD program at the University of Alberta. Luckily, my business is really location independent. The internet has done so much to allow us to communicate remotely that working from anywhere truly is a reality these days.

I’ve been setting up tools for my business for quite some time with a mind to being able to work from anywhere. Here’s the list of what I use:

Vonage – For my business phone. Unlimited minutes and two phone numbers – one for those in Hamilton and one for those in Edmonton. Call quality so far has been excellent.

Blackberry – For cell and email on the go. I know some people prefer iPhones but I like the tiny keyboard for tapping out quick emails while I’m heading somewhere.

MyFax – Sometimes you need to actually send a fax. Instead of buying a fax machine, I have a subscription to MyFax, which emails me any faxes I receive as PDFs.

iPad – Yes, I bought one. I really do love it. I got the model with 3G so I have internet with me wherever I go. It’s super portable, and it’s great for killing time by working on my task list. I also bought the keyboard to go with it. The keyboard on screen is large enough that I don’t make too many mistakes, but I prefer a real keyboard for serious typing.

Freshbooks – For billing, tracking expenses and time tracking. If you haven’t tried it, you’re missing out. I use the recurring billings for hosting, domain registrations and search engine optimization contracts. Makes my life easy and creates easy reports that makes my accountant’s life easy as well!

Basecamp – For project management. I have been a client of Basecamp since February 9 2004 – 4 days after they launched. I’ve used it continuously since then for project collaboration. Clients (mostly) love it and I love that it keeps everything in one place and on track.

Highrise – By the same folks who brought you Basecamp. I used to work at a CRM software company and most enterprise-level CRM solutions are overkill for the solo or small business owner. Highrise keeps what’s necessary and cuts out what isn’t.

There’s are a few more web tools that I use for specific project reasons, but these are the major ones that keep my business humming.

There are things that I am going to miss about Ontario, and in person meetings will require more notice than a day or two, but I am looking forward to the adventure! I’ll be flying back to Hamilton for a visit in November 2010, and if you find yourself in the Edmonton area, drop me a line!

Here’s some stats from a client’s website. I won’t say what client or the time line I picked for the visits, but I can assure that this is very typical for their statistics.

Here is their browser breakdown:

And here is their breakdown for Internet Explorer:

We’re talking about a major update for this client’s website next year and the idea of having to support Internet Explorer 6 users gives me a headache. I will likely be adding the IE6 Update tool on my own website and talking to a few clients about adding it to theirs. There’s even a WordPress plugin for it.

Let’s kill IE6 dead!

In the year that I worked with them, I redesigned their website, implemented an email marketing campaign, and created a pay-per-click advertising campaign. We used email marketing to put together an automated “tip of the month” campaign – every month, an email is sent to their subscriber base, and the tip of the month is automatically posted to the website. The best part is that we only had to set it up at the beginning and it will run for a year without any additional work required.

Kathleen was also the person who gave me my tagline – from inception to execution. Here’s what she had to say about working with me:

You really are my one stop shopping for web technology. You execute the branding for my company on web. I consider you an essential are part of my marketing team, to advise me on the best solutions for my web needs and to help me implement them trouble shoot etc. You provide the link from inception of an idea to execution on the web.

Steph Seagram, Program Director at The Cossart Exchange, was very complimentary:

You are great at ID-ing what is needed and then identifying what the best options are to quickly, efficiently and ‘budgetmindedly’ meet that need. You are in tune with trends but also have the industry experience and know how to steer through those trends while keeping an eye on the big picture.

But about once a year, towards the beginning of the summer, the Yellow Pages rep comes calling to my clients. Some of my clients have been advertising with the Yellow Pages for years and are seeing less and less of a return on their (rather significant) investment. They’re thinking about having a smaller ad, or no ad at all. Yellow Pages does not release demographic statistics, but it’s common knowledge that consumers 30 and younger generally search online or ask their friends for business recommendations.

The Yellow Pages reps always tell my clients the same stories but they’re getting more insistent in recent years. Their FUD runs along these lines:

1. We are the only authorized Google AdWords reseller in Canada.
There’s two parts to this. First, it implies that being a Google AdWords reseller is better than a consultant who works with AdWords. That’s absolutely not true. You do not receive better rates by working with a reseller – if anything, it costs more and they provide you with less reporting. Secondly, they are not the only authorized Google AdWords reseller in Canada.

2. Having a listing on the Yellow Pages will improve your rank on Google.
Nope. Check out a Yellow Pages listing. You’ll see that the link to the website is actually something like http://www.yellowpages.ca/gourl/http://www.yourcompany.com – that means that the link actually is a redirect from the Yellow Pages site, not a true link to your site. It may pass along some link value but it’s of low value.

3. The Yellow Pages website gets more traffic than Google!
Absolutely not. I think the below chart (from Alexa, a well-regarded provider of competitive website statistics) will paint the real picture. I’ve included canpages.ca for comparison purposes.

4. We have special ways of making your site show up on Google – no one else can do that.
They’re talking about pay-per-click advertising here. I’ll tell you their secret – they’re using the local business options available to any AdWords advertiser. Nothing secret there, just knowing what boxes to click.

And worst of all…

5. If you cancel your ad with us, your ranking will go down on Google.
An absolute lie. Ask them for proof – how will this happen? Ask for specific examples. In my experience, I have not seen any detrimental ranking effects when a client has canceled or downgraded their Yellow Pages listing. If anything, they can improve their reach because of the money they saved!

I’ve been discussing these issues with other web developers on Twitter for a couple of weeks and if the folks at Yellow Pages even noticed, they haven’t said anything. If Yellow Pages was as web-savvy as they claim, they would have picked up on the Twitter mentions by now and gotten in touch.

I’ll save the importance of monitoring Twitter for another post, but if you’re not paying attention to what is being said about you (or your competition) on the web, you’re missing out on serious opportunities. And it says a thing or two about your ability to compete on the web.

But really the fact of the matter is – websites are hard. Writing content is really hard, especially when you’re talking about yourself. Most web designers will tell you that the shoemaker’s children often go barefoot.

How do you get over this content writing hump? One way is to lock yourself in a room and not be let out until you have beautiful content for every page of your website. Or, to avoid starvation, you can tackle it in little bits. Work on a page a day. Or ask your clients what they like about your products and services – you’ll be surprised at what they say and it may provide inspiration.

When I work with my clients on websites where a significant amount of new content is required, I will bring a copyeditor into the project where possible. At the very least, working with a copyeditor for the key pages of your website is an investment worth making. If you don’t have content for a page, don’t publish it. There are few things worse than a “coming soon” page on a website.

While writing the content for my website, I asked my clients for feedback and gave myself strict deadlines. For example, I would tell myself that a certain page needed to be done by noon. Or this blog post had to be written in 45 minutes. For me, working under pressure is best. Not every word that pours from your keyboard needs to be incredible, world-changing prose. Just tell people how you solve their problems in simple terms, and you’d be surprised at how quickly the content comes.

Elaine Holding, Director of Client Services & Business Development, had some very nice things to say about me:

… you recommended and developed a presence for us on the web that conveyed the company’s personality and brand. Is there such a thing as a web engineer? You seem to be at the top of your
game with web know-how that appears to be driven by passion rather than dollars. I really do feel that you have our best interests at heart and try your very best to suggest the most effective paths to optimum visibility at a fair price. Your responsiveness to our requests is outstanding. I am afraid we are too spoiled to change.

Visit the SB Partners website – they’re a great accounting firm!