The Problem Small Businesses Don’t Want to Admit

Every small business owner is an entrepreneur and a technician, but not everyone’s a manager.

Most people start a small business after working a job that involves ‘making’. Programming, graphic design, SEO, you name it – small business owners usually get their idea when they realize that they could be doing the same thing as they’re doing now and getting rid of their boss.

Motivated by the mythical entrepreneurial drive and true technical experts in their field, founders don’t realize that they can’t just get rid of the boss — they have to be the boss.

Being the boss involves management of time, people and money. While this can be possible if it’s your only responsibility, on top of everything else it will be overwhelming.

Unfortunately, in starting a small business, suddenly you have a boss again – your customers, the amount of hours in the day and your revenue.

This idea, from Michael E. Gerber‘s The E-Myth is key to understanding why small businesses face the problems they do, especially when growing fast.

Don’t worry: that’s where productivity tools come in.

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What happens if you make software too difficult to use? Probably the same thing that happens if you never made it at all — no one uses it.

It’s easy to get users to adapt to familiar concepts like drag-and-drop, but what if you made something totally new? You need a creative user onboarding process, like the one Microsoft used back in 1992 and the others I’m going to look at in this post.

The Software User Onboarding Process

I already talked about concierge onboarding, so this time I’m going to look at the total opposite — a style known as low-touch user onboarding. It’s not always possible to work with every customer, especially if you’re distributing software on a massive scale like Microsoft Windows, so writing onboarding into your product is a necessity.

James Hunt‘s excellent article on Mental Floss reveals the true purpose of Minesweeper, Microsoft Solitaire, FreeCell and Hearts: a gamified way to teach users concepts vital to success using Windows 3.1.

Let’s take a look at exactly how they did it.
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Have you ever been asked for your email address to see extra blog content? It looks something like this:

That’s a content upgrade. I’ve written pretty extensively about them in this blog post on lead generation, so if you need an in-depth look at the topic (plus the psychology of why it works), that’s the place to start.

They’re great tools for blogs connected to businesses because they capture the contact info of people who are likely to want your product or service. They get the valuable content, you get another email on your list of subscribers plus a free pass to market to them. The best part is that it’s not just any old email address, owned by someone who doesn’t care what you’re saying. It’s the email address of someone who is:

1. Interested enough in what you’ve got to say to give away their email address

2. The perfect fit for your product

It’s doubtful you’re the sort of person who turns down leads, so if you aren’t already using a way to capture emails with content upgrades (or you’re doing it in an awkward way), you’ll want to check out these four tools.

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Hooray! We’re pleased to announce a major integration for Process Street. This time, it’s Zapier. At launch, it connected Process Street with more than 400 services, including Salesforce, Mailchimp, Wufoo, and the Google Apps suite. With over 1,000 apps, announcing our Zapier integration opened far more ways to connect recurring work.

If Zapier were a physical object, it would look a bit like a universal remote connected to an unmanageable tangle of wires, with ends that slot into every kind of machine. Thankfully, it’s a clean-cut, user-friendly SaaS app with huge potential for creativity and workflow streamlining. It makes it easy for non-developers to connect web services together, saving time and improving productivity.

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I was a busy guy.

Between work, family, trying to keep fit, and fitting in a little relaxation, there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to get things done. I’d get to the office at 7am, wouldn’t leave until 6pm, ate lunch while processing email, and rushed home to eat dinner with my family so my son had at least a small chance to remember who I was.

That was life until I got serious about managing my time more effectively.

Like a lot of people, I was trapped in a mentality that equated more work with more productivity. I believed the more time I spent at my desk, the greater the rewards would be. I was also sure that sacrificing some things in the short-term — family time, fitness, even health in general — would pay off in the long-term with a higher salary and more free time to do the things I wanted to do instead of the things I had to do.

Boy, was I wrong.

I managed to break out of that mental state and today I am more relaxed than ever, fitter than ever, have a great work/life balance, and spend more time with my family.

How did I do it?

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Best Real Estate Apps to Close More Deals This Year

The real estate industry has come a long way since a long-dead entrepreneur decided to rent a part of their farm land to turn a profit. Down the line we’ve seen verbal agreements and contracts written in stone, all the way through to the mass of paper stored in unorganized filing cabinets we’re still unfortunately dealing with.

Even though computers have been widely used by agencies for over 20 years, paper documents are still around causing trouble. Maybe it was software industry’s fault for a long time, but now thanks to Android, iOS and the huge number of productivity tools at our disposal, there’s no excuse to be disorganized

Take a look at the 5 best real estate apps for simplifying your operations and closing more deals.

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What is The Checklist Manifesto?

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is a 2009 non-fiction book by Atul Gawande. The book was released on Dec 2009 and was a New York Times Best Seller.

In the book, Atul (who is a surgeon by trade) talks about how many industries across the world use checklists to “get things done right”. He also breaks down his journey as the one of the key champions that brought checklists into hospitals around the world. This endeavor had incredible results. Below is a quote from a post in the New Yorker that talks about the rollout of checklists in just one state, Michigan.

In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan’s I.C.U.s decreased by sixty-six per cent. The typical I.C.U.—including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital—cut its quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175,000,000 in costs and more than 1,500 lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.

The short of the matter is, checklists work. I have written about the power of checklists before when I told the story of how a checklist won World War II. But in today’s day and age, it seems silly to be relying on paper checklists, it only makes sense that as technology evolves we evolve with it.

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Ok, so, I am far from an epic content creator. I am, however, aspiring to become a better one and in that journey, I have come across some great resources on how to become a better writer and content creating extraordinaire.

I mentioned some of these in my post – Advanced Content Promotion Checklist (interactive checklist), but this is such a critical point that I thought they deserved their own post. Plus, this is kind of an exercise for me where I force myself to re-read them all. I hope they help you create epic content.

On a side note, if you’re interested in blogging we just released our tool Checklists for Bloggers – a simple way to create checklists that you can embed onto your blog and capture leads with. Check it out here.

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We’re on a mission to make Process Street the simplest, most powerful checklist tool ever made. That means creating new awesome features, and making the ones we have even more awesome!

Today we have a neat little release, which allows you to attach files and images to comments.

If you’re building a startup of any kind, chances are you’ll need an explainer video.

Explainer videos are short 1-3 minute videos that help spread your message and teach people what your product and company is all about. A startup video can help explain difficult to understand concepts and, if you’re lucky, can go viral and give you a bunch of traction — as was the case with Dropbox.

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