Up and Running Blog

January 2009

Change.gov – Speak your mind

by Chelle Parmele on January 15, 2009

Next week the United States will swear in the 44th President, Barack Obama. Since being elected, Mr. Obama has shown us the kind of change he promised us in the way he’s started his transition. One such example of that has been the Change.gov website where his administration has asked you, the American people, to submit your ideas or suggestions on where our priorities should lay or how certain things should be done. He has said more than once that he welcomes good ideas, no matter where they come from.

The text at the top of the page asks:

Share your ideas on any issue facing the new administration, then rate or comment on other ideas. The best rated ideas will rise to the top — and be gathered into a Citizen’s Briefing book to be delivered to President Obama after he is sworn in.

Friday is the very last day you can participate in this  amazing opportunity. As a small or medium business, what happens in the next year is going to be important to the ongoing health and strength of your business. And this is a rare opportunity to give your opinion. To help guide the new administration in the way it will help and handle the nation.

Take the time today or tomorrow to make your voice heard. Visit the Citizen’s Briefing Book and add your idea, or search for one that matches your desires for the country and vote.

  “Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”  -Barack Obama

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager

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Sabrina Parsons on Business TalkRadio's Computer America January 15th

by Chelle Parmele on January 14, 2009

Palo Alto Software’s Sabrina Parsons will be a guest on Business TalkRadio’s show, Computer America – this Thursday, January 15th from 7-8PM PST, with Craig Crossman

Sabrina will be discussing how to conquer email fatigue.

Appealing to novices and experts alike, this daily program gives listeners the unique opportunity to call in with questions for the host and his featured guests from the computer world. Along with these big-name guests and the latest breaking computer news, a Celebrity Computing segment features celebrities, political figures and other celebrated personalities discussing how they use their computers at home and at work. computeramerica.com is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.computeramerica.com and is listened to daily by 14,000 people.

http://www.computeramerica.com/

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The Blog Week in Review

by Jay Snider on January 14, 2009

Here’s a round-up of blog posts from the past week that you may have missed.

Measure Your Business Plan Results — Tim Berry discusses how to do plan versus actual comparisons

Rapid-Response Targeting — A great MediaPost interview with Palo Alto Software CEO Sabrina Parsons

Iconophiles Unite! –  Let the icons guide the way through Email Center Pro

Top 100 Blogs For Small-Business Cost Cutting Inspiration — Business in General Blog named in the top 15

4 Overlooked Strategies to Grow Your Service Business — Suggestions for thriving in the current economic climate

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New Electric Car

by Tim Berry on January 14, 2009

So this was obvious but worth noting because it’s what you and I expected, and it shows that the right kind of business is going to go on. Toyota has announced plans to build an electric town car. Let’s see a show of hands now: Who’s surprised?credit: Toyota

So everybody is pretty much set on what’s getting the most investor interest, market interest and new efforts to start new business. And it’s what we’re now calling clean tech. And green business.

(photo credit: Toyota)

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Is your website working?

by Chelle Parmele on January 13, 2009

Are My Sites Up? is a relatively new free web-based service that helps you keep track of up time for your websites.

The service will send you a SMS alert if your website goes down to help you respond faster and get your business back on line as soon as possible. Vital if you depend on online sales. Every minute your online business is down is money lost.

After being featured on Lifehacker and Webware, Are My SitesUp? have temporarily closed down new signups, but with a service as useful as this, they should be on your “watch” list. You can subscribe to their blog which will alert everyone when the service is open for signups again.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager

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Sales taxes heading toward Internet businesses

by Steve Lange on January 13, 2009

The tax man is coming to your Internet store. Sooner than you think.

Today, 13 January 2009, New York State Supreme Court Justice Eileen Bransten dismissed a lawsuit brought by Amazon.com challenging New York State’s right to collect sales tax from out-of-state Internet retailers.

With most states cash-strapped and facing decreased revenues from existing sources, collecting sales tax on goods sold via the Internet and delivered in-state is looking like a ripe plum.

Much hinges on interpretation of conditions included in a 1992 US Supreme Court ruling, on what constitutes a “substantial physical presence” in the state.

While this issue may not be resolved one way or the other in the immediate future, NOW is the time to look into your Internet store’s system functionality. Implementing software changes to your system to comply with sales tax collection will be a problem; more likely a nightmare.

Most local, physical retail stores only have to collect taxes for one state, and possibly a county or municipality. An Internet store will need to incorporate and apply tax rates for all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. dependencies and territories. (Don’t kid yourself. Once the Internet sales tax moratorium dam breaks, every taxing entity which can will be riding the flood waters.)

In many states sales taxes are not collected in a blanket application. Sometimes groceries are exempt, but prepared foods, such as restaurants are taxed. Sometimes prescription medicines are exempt. In other cases, certain classes of goods are considered luxury items and taxed that way. Therefore, your store will need to be programmed to compute and collect taxes based on these variables as well. (Your customers will demand it. They won’t want to pay sales tax to you if their local store doesn’t have to charge it.)

And that’s not all. Not only will your site’s store be responsible for charging and collecting the sales taxes, but your bookkeeping and financial departments will need to adjust all their systems in order to track, and subsequently pay all that collected tax to all those states and agencies.

If your company has been doing Internet sales to the United Kingdom you have some small idea how badly this will shake up operations. This past year the U.K. changed their Value Added Tax, V.A.T., from 17.5% to 15%, on short notice. Many businesses are still struggling to bring their sales and accounting systems into compliance.

Of course, there is a small bright side to this. Here’s an opportunity for some entrepreneurs to set themselves up as tax rate by ZIP code databases, or info clearinghouses, or systems upgrade specialists, etc.

We are living in a new economic landscape. The old assumptions no longer apply. Internet sales taxes are coming. Start planning and implementing your system upgrade changes NOW.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

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Good Background Info for Nonprofits

by Tim Berry on January 13, 2009

I’ve been spending a lot of time (maybe way too much) with Twitter lately (you can find me there as timberry) so I feel like at least one of the good things about that is suggestions such as idealist.org, which I got from a Twitter friend and seems like a really good recommendation for people looking into nonprofits or social media.

That site seems to have very good basic information on setting up and running a nonprofit, on a wide variety of topics ranging from legal to fundraising, marketing, etc.

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Build Something Great. Destruction or Rebirth

by Tim Berry on January 12, 2009

OK everybody, enough about the downturn, credit squeeze and how much less money, your savings and your house are worth. We all get it, and at least we all (or at least everybody I know) went down the net worth slide together. Let’s get back to work.

I liked the reporting at the Tech Crunch Crunchy awards over the weekend. There are some good reminders in this post by Erik Schonfeld.

Facebook once again won the overall prize for the second year in a row, and Mark Zuckerberg also picked up the best CEO prize. During his acceptance speech, Zuckerberg’s message to all the other entrepreneurs in the audience was that even during an economic downturn they can build something great and become a beacon of light for the rest of the industry. Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie, who was on hand to accept the prize for Best Technology Achievement, struck a similar chord:

When we are in an environment with technological and environmental change, you have to focus on these new huge constraints, but also new opportunities for destruction or rebirth.

Yes! Let’s hear it for a breath of fresh air and a reminder that business is still business, and what works is doing something that, well, with apologies for the redundancy, works. Like the winners said.

The easy VC money might have stopped flowing to startups, but that doesn’t mean the world has stopped. I was acutely reminded of that fact simply by watching the hardened optimism of everyone in the theater. Some people compare the Crunchies to the Oscars of Tech, but we like to think of it more as a large family gathering. For all the blogs involved–GigaOM, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch–it’s our way of saying, “Thank You” to all the startups and tech companies out there. If they didn’t keep striving to become that beacon of light, we’d have nothing to write about.

Note: I got the photo from Techbays.

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Measure Your Business Plan Results

by Tim Berry on January 9, 2009

(Note: this is from my business plans coaching column this month at Entrepreneur.com. I’m reposting it here, with permission, for convenience of our BIG blog readers. Tim.)

Plans are wrong, but nonetheless vital. There’s a paradox for you. It’s a simple statement, one that I hope is somewhat surprising coming from a business planning expert; but it’s still very important. And it gets right to the heart of what business planning is all about.

More than ever, those who plan look to projections that often miss the mark. Nobody I know, and in fact nobody I’ve even heard about, accurately predicted the sharp plunge in the economy last fall. So of course those who actually use a business planning process are implementing a lot of course corrections, reviews and revisions.

It’s a great example of how this paradoxical statement — plans are wrong, but nonetheless vital — makes sense. As we look at the year to come, most of us are dialing down our forecasts. Does that mean we wasted our time making them? Not at all. How do we even make sense of where we are if we don’t have a map that shows us how we got there?

If you had a plan earlier this year and results differed greatly from what was expected, I hope you’re taking the time to compare those results, in detail, to the earlier plan. Look for where the differences were greatest. Look for where expenses were tied to sales. Look for the bright spots where sales held up. Look for how the numbers were supposed to come together, and not just how they didn’t.

And if you didn’t have a plan, then think of this as a good time to get a planning process started so you have a better view of your business in the future. Start making simple sales and expense projections. Don’t worry that they’re wrong; just make sure you go back each month and plot where and how and in which direction they were wrong so you can correct them.

You should only be wrong a month at a time, and as you use that plan-vs.-results analysis to look more closely at how things are going, you adjust again and improve results for the next time around. With each month, your grasp on reality gets better.

And then, as things go back up — and they will — you’ll be able to use what you learned to see the signs, anticipate and act accordingly.

This kind of planning process is what’s meant by the phrase, “The plan may be wrong, but planning is essential.” Then there’s another old military saying: “No battle plan ever survived the first encounter with the enemy.” What does happen, though, with battle plans as well as business plans, is you don’t know how to recover or how to adjust the plan if you didn’t have a plan in the first place.

Tim Berry
President and Founder
Palo Alto Software

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More Bad News for Employment

by Tim Berry on January 9, 2009

Honestly, I wasn’t paying much attention to these ADP reports until the downturn really went sour last September. I posted on them a couple of times when small business employment grew, slightly, in the midst of bad news almost everywhere else. And now it seems like cheating if I don’t keep up with it, as the bad news rolls in.

Small businesses lost 281,000 jobs in December. That was 80,000 in manufacturing and 201,000 in services. By the way, ADP defines small business as having fewer than 50 employees. That works for me.

The source document is at www.ADPemploymentreport.com.

I downloaded some statistics as an Excel file available from that site. It turns out that goods-producing small businesses have lost more than half a million jobs since the high point of January of 2007, when they employed 8.1 million people. Service sector small businesses have lost more than half a million jobs since their high point of just last April 2008, when they employed 43 million people.

What’s surprising to me, also, is that this new data isn’t surprising. I’m not sure I’m going to continue to post these monthly results. I don’t want to be predictable.

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