Less than 12 hours ago, I received an email sent through our contact form from a potential client who wanted to know more about our company.  He wanted to know how long we have been in business and how big our firm is.  He noted that our mailing address looked like a small business running out of some one’s apartment.  He wanted to know if the business he is dealing with is a big, fail-proof company. 

At first I was worried about how best to respond to this inquiry. After all, we are a small company that is run virtually.  Everyone who has ever worked on this project has been contracted virtually.  In the spirit of being an online accounting software, we conduct our business using as many “online tools” as possible.

I wrote back telling only the truth:

• we are a small company
• we operate from home and allow our contractors to operate from home
• when customers write or call, the founders are the ones who answers the emails and the phone – sometimes at very interesting hours (make sure you turn your email notifications off on your blackberry or iphone while you sleep at night)
• when people from Europe and Asia contact us, they get the same quick response as people contacting us from North America
• we don’t have to abide by certain office hours that are restricted to location and timezone
• when there is a quick feature request like adding multiple currencies or fixing software bugs, it is fixed within days (if not immediately).  Some bigger desktop software vendors will require you to wait for a whole year before they release a new version of the software
• we hire the best security and hosting experts with 24/7 security and support to ensure all client data is safe, even while we sleep

I wasn’t sure if it would be ok for me to be so transparent about how we operate.  After all, some of our competitors spend millions of dollars a year running their businesses.  They have offices in multiple locations all over the world.  Recently I found out that a company providing similar services as us burns 6 million dollars a year.  I thought to myself, “wow, give me 6 million dollars and I would only spend a fraction of that amount”.  In fact, within 1 month of our full launch, the business is already paying its own bills. 

Maybe there are many people who have the misconception that small businesses are more likely to fail.  While this is not my belief, I didn’t have any famous people to back me up until this morning when I ran across Seth Godin’s blog where he spoke about how “small is the new big“.  I think Seth is famous enough for me to quote him on this matter:

Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.

Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

Small means that you can answer email from your customers.

Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.

A small law firm or accounting firm or ad agency is succeeding because they’re good, not because they’re big. So smart small companies are happy to hire them.

Needless to say, I was relieved.  We are doing something right after all and there is no shame in being small and telling the truth on my blog.  A R&D team of 50 software engineers may not be as effective as one software engineer who created Clarity Accounting within one year.  Talk about real ingenuity and effectiveness…

Seth Godin wrote this blog post in 2005 and I just happen to come across it when he referred to it in his newest blog post “Too small to fail“.  While this post was written 3 years ago, there is really an element of timelessness in his writing. 

Some things will never change…

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Today I was reading a post from Seth Godin’s blog titled “The bitter taste of nickels and dimes” where he went to a Whole Foods store to get his favorite Rooibos tea and requested a cup of ice from the server.  Since there was a company policy to charge $0.50 extra for ice, and Seth didn’t want to pay $0.50 extra for the ice, he ended up getting hot tea instead of iced tea.

I think the essence of running a business is often lost when companies began to apply rules about what a customer service person can or cannot do.  In my opinion, the essence of any business is customer satisfaction.  The employee at Whole Foods was just following the rules that has been created by the company, however, her rule-abiding actions has triggered one of the greatest marketing gurus to write about his bad experience at the Whole Foods store.  It really didn’t matter how great the Rooibos tea was…

I think a very important aspect of running a business is to ensure that customers feel like they have been listened to and appreciated.  I had an interesting experience when we first started our online accounting software project.  At some point along the way when we began to move in to beta, I realized it was time to get a CRM solution organized.  Since we provide a Web 2.0 accounting solution, I thought it would be a great idea to try out other web hosted CRM solutions.  Naturally, I searched around Google and found Salesforce — who is undoubtedly the largest online CRM solution on the web today.  I saw a link on the website that said, “sign up for a free trial today and get a free copy of the book Salesforce for Dummies“.  I thought, what a great deal! I am a dummy user and I get a free book just by signing up for a free trial.  So, I click on the banner that said free trial Salesforce for 30 days and began the sign up process.  I must say that Salesforce has a great follow up system.  I get an email and a call almost immediately after my sign up, offering to support me in any way possible.  I was delighted.  After a week or so, I realized that I haven’t received my free book Salesforce for Dummies so I decided to mention it in one of the phone conversations with a customer service rep.  I was told that I had “clicked on the wrong link” and therefore, I am not eligible to get a free book.  But I signed up for a free trial! I thought to myself.  So I very politely asked the sales rep if I could get a free book anyways since this is one of their offers for people who have signed up for a free trial.  This was what I was told: since I didn’t click on the right link, I was not on the list to get a free book. If I really wanted to get a free book, I would have to go back and click on the right link and sign up all over again.  I could feel the sense of annoyance and betrayal stirring inside of me and feeling cheated by Salesforce.  Then I was even more annoyed when I was told that I had to pay annually up front when the marketing message on the website said, “Full Featured CRM starting at $65/month/user“.  I thought I was going to be able to pay $65/month to ensure I have better cashflow and I was told that I had to pay $780 / year / user at the end of my 30 day trial.  So I asked, “I thought it said on your website that you charge $65/month?”  The sales rep told me that $780/ year works out to be $65/ month.  Now I really feel cheated.  Why can’t they just do what they say they would do on their website?  Is it that much trouble to ensure that I get a free book?  Maybe even change their marketing message on their website to $780/ year / user.  Now they have got me ranting on them months after my bad experience with them.  I told the sales rep not to contact me anymore because I have had a bad experience.  I was asked to explain myself and I felt so betrayed I didn’t even bother.  Now I am ranting on the world wide web instead.

Just like the server at the Whole Foods store could have made an exception for Seth as a valued customer who loved his Rooibos tea with ice, the Salesforce team could have understood my desire to learn more about Salesforce by ensuring that I get a free book.  To think that they have now over 43,600 clients paying at least $780/month/user which translates to a minimum revenue of 34 million dollars per year, the least they could have done was send me a free book like their website said they would.

I can assure people that when it comes to serving customers, I always do what I say I will do and I try my best to understand their needs.  I am really hoping that when our online accounts software gets to serve millions of happy customers and making more than 30 million dollars in revenue, I will ensure that people at all levels of my company remember that while there may be rules, the common sense will always be doing the little things that create happy customers.

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Today I was reading the newest blog post on Seth Godin’s Blog called “My tooth doesn’t hurt“, where he discussed the implications of attracting new clients for dentists when people are not having toothaches.  When we were first starting our business, we had a fair share of people, MBA graduates and other so-called “business advisors” telling us that we need to identify a pain and really sell people on that pain.  This is quite obvious in the insurance industry when the insurance reps are trained by their head-office sales trainers that they must trigger some kind of pain in people so that clients would want to buy insurance.  I am personally not a fan of pain marketing.  Once upon a time I worked in an insurance company that provided critical illness insurance coverage to clients.  I saw some of the marketing material stating that 2 out of 3 people will get either cancer, heart attack, or stroke before turning 65 years of age.  What was even more astonishing to me was that 2/3 of people who bought critical illness insurance policies actually claim within 2 years.  Now, some would say that this is a great reason to buy insurance policies but I began to realize that what the mind focuses on expands and maybe the people who were drawn to buying critical insurance policies spent too much time being afraid of the possibility of being ill…

In the case of dentists, it probably doesn’t surve them well to focus on toothaches in their advertising campaign because most people don’t have toothaches and do not want to be thinking about them.  What people need is a dentist they can think of and recommend when someone else has a toothache.  It is always easier to identify other people’s problems instead of our own.

This is also true when I began thinking about how to market our online accounting software.  Most people I have spoken to would agree that bookkeeping is not high on the list of priorities for most business owners.  In fact, most great entrepreneurs are not great bookkeepers.  As business owners we spent most of our time focusing on building our businesses and getting sales.  However, accurate bookkeeping has many great benefits to business owners.  For example, a business has a much better chance of success if the business owner knows how much money he/she is making or losing.  Internet websites and permission email marketing with newsletters are great ways of reminding our clients the benefits of using our easy accounting software.  If you would like to receive our monthly newsletter (or know someone with issues in getting their business records organized), please click on the Clarity Accounting Demo link and check off the box that says “Send me updates with Clarity Accounting updates and small business success tips…”.

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