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Imagine starting a business by buying a box of Lego looking cogwheels and parts. Each part is a working system that can be used to build a larger business machine.

The best way to do this would be to start out with a step by step blueprint to build your own “generic” basic shell of a business machine. Once the basic shell is together, you can focus on building out the individual parts without being overwhelmed by the other parts not yet in place.

What would this blueprint look like? What are the basic generic parts?

Most people who start a business are technicians who do the work and thus focus solely on the “Production” part of the business machine and try to make it the central core. This is due to lack of basic business understanding and skills.

In reality, the “Production” part is a surprisingly small cogwheel in the overall business blueprint.

I developed a graphical model of my vision of a generic business machine and where the “Production” or technical work fits.

From this blueprint one would build up the basic components of a business and continue to fill it in overtime as needed to keep up with improvements and change.

In my model, customer experience is critical. While other places use the term “Customer Life Cycle”, I feel that is wrong as that implies your only there to guide the customer from birth to death in a very non- personal environment.

I prefer to look at it as a continuous cycle that never ends. In the service business a personal customer experience is like a spa visit. They like it and they want to come back and tell their friends all about it.

I call my model a “Customer Experience Cycle”. It does not end unless they want to get off and never come back and then you have not done something right.

One of the biggest secrets you can learn in business is how to control the individual customers personal experience. Many places are so used to reacting and trying to make the customer happy that the begin to resent the client and then the relationship ends without a fighting chance.

Even the most demanding and uptight customer can be made happy as long as they want to be your customer. When someone no longer wants to be your customer, they will let you know by asking for a full refund and bailing on a bad “experience”.

Yes, it is a bad experience that ruins relationships.

You want your business engine to support an outstanding and long lasting relationship with your customer. It is a balance of sacrifice on your part to fulfill their expectations and assertiveness on your part to fulfill your own needs. The end result is a smooth running, and never ending experience cycle.

In my model, the core engine parts are;

- Vision
- Design
- Policy
- Training
- Production
- Feedback

These engine parts revolve around a core Data Warehouse System.

This engine drives an initial contact system, a first visit system, a follow up system, a retention system and a repeat contact system.

A “Get New Clients System” for lack of a better description, is your marketing and advertising and referral system that brings in new clients.

The Initial Contact System is made up of a sales pipeline that supports both abbreviated initial contacts such as break-fix work and for in-depth long term sales such as projects and signing up for managed services, using the technology service business as a target industry.

Notice that the production or technical work part is indeed just a single part of a larger system.

With a blueprint like this, you can get started building your business and focus on individual parts in a clear and concise manner.

There is a science to decision making yet many books about sales decisions talk about leaders who are quick to decide and slow to change a decision. This implies consistancy is more important than the actual decision making process. An executive decision maker needs to understand the scientific process behind decisions. Leaders of governments and militaries have been using the same model for centuries.

However, it seems to me that most business skills training resources still do not include a decent business decision making process.

Below I have taken centuries old knowledge passed down thru time by leaders of great nations and military forces and translated it to our service request and work order process in the form of a chart. I hope its self explanatory, my notes on this are 20 pages long

Given time, you want to follow thru the entire process in detail. When time is short, you must abbreviate the process as best you can. It is good to practice such a process both in the detailed form and the abbreviated version. This will teach scalability in use of process flows.

In business, the “tip of the iceberg” example of small being part of somthing larger for a manager is the use of management points. These are internal use only where as customer contact points are generally for external use only. Having internal management points allows a manager to leverage his time and energy across distance and receive proper feedback reporting.

Management contact points are where the managers touch or make direct contact with the business operations.

Feedback report points are individual criteria to measure status. Thus a report is a tip that summarizes or represents a larger underneath.

Management tools allow us to better touch management points and receive feedback report points. They can be direct controls, indirect monitoring systems and after the fact reporting process strategies.

The end result desired is of effective, high quality results, or “A great job well done!” that did not “cost us an arm or a leg.”.

Remember a “Point in Time” when you had to use a wrench to remove a lug nut from a automobile tire only to discover it was on so tight you had to spend a long amount of time and all your energy to struggle just to get it loose? You may even have broken a tool, stripped or damaged a lug nut, gotten a scrape or banged a knuckle or worse. When you’re done your tired, weak, exhausted, dirty and even bruised or hurt. You look bad and will need time to clean up, recover your energy and repair damage.

Not exactly a great job well done, even if you do eventually “manage” to get the tire changed.

We are not even going to talk about if you had the right spare with you, or it was out of air and flat. That would just be ” insult to injury” and a total waste of everything you just did. That’s a proactive management issue.

In this situation, the wrench is the worker, your management point of contact is with the wrench, not the lug nut or work itself. Your management tool is your hand and eventually you had to commit your entire body weight to move the wrench. Your basic feedback report points you should be worried about are, “Is the lug nut loose yet?”, “How much has it cost me in time, in my total resources, in total energy?”, “Did I get hurt, loose a finger, break the wrench, strip the lug nut, damage the tire or otherwise consume supplies?”.

Your reporting points tell you that, You spent a great deal of time, you consumed every ounce of your energy and strength, committed everything your body had, and may have even damaged a tool or hurt yourself. Overall, you’re not very happy or as satisfied as you could be.

This is why many people prefer to just call a spouse or road side service and have someone else do it. You may think this is a smart way to leverage your time as it is called. Meanwhile, you are still stuck on the side of the road waiting for someone else to manage the job for you, a middle manager, or middle-man so to speak. In reality, by the time they get there and finish, you could have still struggled with it, completed the job, cleaned up and recovered your energy in the same amount of time. “Six of one, half a dozen of another” as the old saying goes. In reality, you did not leverage your time effectively as you had nothing else to do while you waited. You simply traded you time and resources to avoid the perception of engaging in pleasure less and unsatisfying work.

Notice that the iceberg in our example has only a tip and the underneath. There is no middle. In business, having no middle means “direct”. Direct to the customer and direct management both do not use middle salesmen or middle management. Dell employs this idea as “Direct to the Customer” and saves on middleman expense while maximizing profit. A company that has a single executive control center that directly manages workforce locations makes use of direct management. A single tip, directly controls the entire body. That’s speed and efficiency.

In mechanics, a “cheater bar” is a layman’s term for a long bar or hollow steel tube that slips over the end of a wrench and uses “leverage” to allow almost effortless operation of the wrench. With the right cheater bar, with the right length, you could stand up and with a light touch of your finger, loosen the most difficult of lug nuts with ease due to the power of leverage. The point on the bar your finger touches is like a management point of contact for control. The cheater bar represents a special management tool that makes your job faster, easier and more efficient. Feeling the lug nut loosen with ease is an operational feedback point, a direct, to the point, report of results. Again, such feedback is just the tip of a larger iceberg of a process, but at this point in time, it is all you are really concerned with.

Getting the same work results done with less time, effort and energy on your part is true leverage and much more effective.

Effectiveness is the tip of a larger process that represents a whole end result.

There is a particular basic concept you need to grasp in business. You already use it but you need to see it for what it is so you can better use it. That is the concept of something small representing something much bigger. An iceberg is a great example. We see the tip above the water but do not see the rest of it which can be huge. The tip is an abbreviated version supported by the larger in-depth part.

In a service business, a customer will never interact with you as a whole. They will just see or perceive a small tip of what is a larger entity. They only know you from what they see or what you tell them. When they walk into your shop they only see the front end area. If you had the time, you could give them a grand tour and a long speech of what makes you special and what you can do for them. Perhaps you can do that as an open house one day, if they have time to show up. But until then, they will only interact with a small part, a tip of the iceberg. This tip is a point of contact. They may never fully comprehend the rest of you that exists unseen.

Thus their first impression of you as a whole is what influences their perception of you and it is all based on just this small external tip or external contact point. Nothing else matters at that moment in time.

Examples of such customer points of contact are;

Physical Appearance
Business Cards
Telephone system quality
Answering the phone
Answering machine scripts
Advertisements
Mailings
Signage
Store Fronts
Entry Ways
Waiting areas
Front Counters
Cashiers
Salesmen
Display areas
Vehicles
Onsite Technicians
Power point presentations
Catalogues of services and products
Websites
Awards and Diplomas

Please note that when you hang something on the wall about yourself like a diploma, award, newspaper article or industry patent, you are displaying something small that represent something bigger. Just remember, clutter is bad so if you have so many awards they would consume all the space on a wall, just hang an appropriate sized photograph of you and your entire collection. You will be glad you did. Clutter is like an upside down iceberg and that might be so funny to see, that your original “Point” is overlooked.

In these and other such areas, you have but a brief moment to visually relay your own vision of yourself , “Put your best foot forward” and “Make a good first impression”

Focus on such points of contact to support an effective customer experience.

GTD pocket briefcases and Notetaker wallets are very popular. However, since I prefer to use a standard 3×5 flip notepad (cheaper and locally available), I am stuck not being happy with anything available so far. So, no one laugh, but I designed my own and made a prototype for my personal use.

I started with a Cambridge 70 sheet 3×5 writing pad, a $10 At-A-Glance two year pocket calandar, and a nice pen. I then designed a construction paper mockup to test feasability. That worked so well I rushed to Joann Fabrics (of course the one I installed the servers in when I was doing retail contract work) and checked the remnants bin and for $10 got the imitation leather and white inner cloth to make the prototype. I have done amature bookbinding and figured I could handle this.

I am not happy with my initial stitchwork but it improved greatly.

I carry this thing in my back pocket. Its a bit bulky but not bad for a first attempt.

I use it alot and will jot down appointments and manually sync with my Outlook which then of course syncs with the Blackjack II cell phone for electronic reminders.

While I rip some of the individual note pages out to place in the In Box, I mainly keep the notepads intact for quick reference of recent onsite work as I deal with lots of computer and network settings at many many locations. Having 70 pages in the notepad is like a portable database with super fast access for recent items. I can pull notes and recent items faster from this than from a computer.

Just last week I had a client call me who was out of state and needed me to remote into her laptop once again. I had done that just two weeks prior and used her LOGMEIN.com account she had setup. I had jotted down her access information at that time onto the notepad. It was still there and took me less than two seconds to flip to it. The client was very impressed.

By Hank Cranmore

One of the first mistakes that is common for someone to do in business is not to capture customer information and history properly. Often this is due to unfamiliarity with proper software tools and procedures. I suspect that age and patience levels can also contribute to someone not adapting quickly to a complex software program. Initially, many teens and other people not familiar with advanced business methods and procedures seem to take very quickly to paper based systems much faster than digital software versions. Therefore, I have developed a simple low cost client management tool made out of card stock paper and cardboard that anyone can design to their liking, print and assemble very quickly. Once assembled, you are up and running fast and can begin to receive client calls, create new account cards, log activity, track billing and ticket history manually, all very fast with historical data retrievable at a quick glance. Budget and experience are no barriers to using this system. Over time as a person’s client base, accounting skill, and understanding of business develop to the point they are ready to proceed to a traditional database system, these cards are already in the perfect format for an easy migration to a digital management system.

First a little history, this system is an old fashioned ledger card method housed in what was called a posting tray. Actually, many small business owners who do not wish to use computers use ledger card systems. Holistic types such as massage therapists actually prefer such systems. In the days before computers, everyone used these and metal trays were devised that could be stored like drawers in a wall holder. Compression plates held the cards together tight while in storage to ensure survival during a fire. If you have ever retrieved a book from a fire that was closed tight you may notice that while the outside and edges got burnt the inside pages generally survived the heat and flames intact. Google ledger card or posting tray and you will find more information to include where to buy metal posting trays.

First you start with a card made from a half page template. You can create a perfect card format using MS office Publisher. Using landscape, you design a half card on a full size page and copy it to the other side. Thus you can print two cards out on a normal sheet of paper or better yet, card stock. A good design will start with client account information and a log to track accounts receivable as well as perhaps any activity you choose to write down. You can even design and create extra cards for things such as network notes, passwords, remote access info, warranty support, machine inventory, software inventory and profiles, and so on.

Next, you print out on card stock paper. You can use different colors to drill down the details of your organization.

You store the cards in a posting tray. Something that can be carried around and then placed in a safe or cabinet at night for safekeeping if so desired.

You can make photo copies of ledger cards to take and store offsite as backup in case of disaster, especially if you are owed money and want to prove it. Actually, courts are used to seeing ledger cards and a hand written card with specific dates that shows no corrections and appears to have been maintained properly can often be used in court better than software printouts for fast decisions. This is even better if your receipts are written with carbon paper directly transferring to entries on the card.

Here are the pictures of a simple system with a cardboard posting tray design.

By Hank Cranmore

I get this question all the time from other consultants, “Whats the Best Backup out there?”. Its a very important question. Unfortunatly, the answer is often found by many in haste with a prepacked solution that is not a complete strategy.

This summary is the result of many hours of research to identify a best practice for Data Backup. Many folks think certain solutions like RAID are a real backup option but they are not. And now, with the cloud promising offsite data storage, there is even more room for misunderstanding. You either backup your data or risk losing it.

You and you alone are responsible for your own data and ensuring it is backed up and ready to recover as fast as you need it. Despite the promises of cloud and virtual computing technology, you will still need both a local copy of your data as well as even the original documents in a worse case scenario. How you manage and tolorate risk will reflect in your backup strategy as a balanced plan or lack of one.

Do you want to rely upon a custom server that uses motherboard based raid? If so, then chances are that a replacement board will not be around when you need it. Perhaps a RAID card and a drive cage system is a better idea. At least in worst case scenario, you get an identical chipset board and pull the raid system from the dead server and drop in into the new system. Better yet, get a DELL or HP server for three to five years on 4 hour or next business day parts replacement plan and your hardware replacement concerns are now worry free. You just will not be able to keep the server for 10 years like some do with custom builts. You will need to plan regular hardware refreshes. Again, its all about your budget and risk tolorance.

I have this grouped in stages from planning to the ultimate and worst data retrieval option which is manual recreation due to total failure of all redundancy and backup methods.

SOLUTION Level/Type 0 – Plan, Design and Document SOP

You have to plan and document your Back Up and Disaster Recovery program based on your business needs, speed of recovery requirements, risk tolerance and budget.

SOLUTION Level/Type 1 – Build on Fault Tolerance – “The cost of failure”

Fault Tolerance is the solid foundation that you want to build your network on. It protects and prevents common problems from causing uncommon disaster.

POWER QUALITY issues can be a major source of problems if it is not conditioned and able to be supplied properly and continuously. The building needs proper wiring and available amperage for actual needs to prevent breakers from shutting down. Surges, Sags/Brownouts, and spikes can damage hardware and cause problems. The higher the wattage on a power supply the better the server or desktop can handle a surge or sag. A quick and high voltage spike can cause immediate or accumulative hardware damage over time. Cheap everyday surge protectors use Metal-Oxide Varistors and only protect a few times before becoming just a power strip. High quality conditioners contain other technologies as well as heavy iron transformers. Use quality Power Conditioners and surge protectors that alert you when its damaged, ($50 to $1000) for printers and UPS with quality inverters for PC’s.

AIR CONDITIONING keeps your servers an hardware running at proper temperatures despite the heat that is generated and can build up by many systems running in an enclosed room. If an AC unit goes down in the server room, the network is down until it is fixed unless there is a backup. Heat can build up slowly and if allowed to spike regularly can accelerate equipment failure. Dirty filters can reduce efficiency and allow heat to build up.

HUMIDITY control protects against mildew, condensation, ESD electrostatic discharges and dry rot. Consider installing humidity monitoring and control devices.

WATER LEAKS require planning to move servers away from sources of potential water damage such as overhead pipes, water heaters, and condensation buildup. Consider installing leak and moister detectors and even automatic water pumps.

VIBRATIONS and jarring shocks can cause downtime. Hard drive power connectors may vibrate loose. Slamming doors and outside vehicle activity can shake entire walls and any equipment near them. Consider installing shock sensors.

SOLUTION Level/Type 2 – Real Time/Hardware Redundancy RAID and MIRROR

RAID Uses redundancy to store data across a mirror or array of multiple hard disk drives in real time. Protects against the loss of at least a single drive and is onsite only. Fire or loss of multiple drives renders the data irretrievable. Can overwrite good data with bad data.

MIRROR Desktops running Windows XP can “mirror” files to a Central Server

Please note that RAID or Mirror is not a backup solution.

SOLUTION Level/Type 3 - Point in Time Backups

From my work with database programming I bring the concept of “Point In Time” to the data backup strategy. People who change tapes daily and rotate across a schedule of 7 or more tapes are already doing this manually. This concept occurs before the data is stored to the removable backup device, allowing the fastest possible data restoration and when used will be the primary backup you restore data from.

SNAPSHOTS. You can take a “picture in time” of your data at predefined times and preserve it for a specified time. Good for when RAID and MIRRORING results in good data overwritten by bad data. Best used to retrieve individual files. Multiple “snapshots” can exist for the same data location. Three snapshots are common, one every few hours, one for each Friday evening, one for each past month. You generally retrieve and or restore from these snapshots. This should be one of the first locations you look to restore data. You still cannot take offsite. They can fail themselves, and can take up a large amount of space and require 3 or more times the space of the actual existing data.

SOLUTION Level/Type 4 - Desktop and Server Image profiles

15 minutes or less to restore an OS drive verses 8+ hours. Include with data to be backed up or treat as a separate backup process but subject to a same scope of solutions. Can be done across network from an onsite image server. Can also be used for Point and Time snapshots of machines.

SOLUTION Level/Type 5 - Onsite Restore Backup

Backups stored onsite allow for easier and faster local recovery and thus are critical to include in your solution yet is rendered useless in a fire, theft or other physical disaster. Many onsite backup solutions cannot be taken offsite. Fire safes can be used but it is still onsite backup storage and other disasters can still render the backups useless or unobtainable.

SOLUTION Level/Type 6 - Offsite Archive and Restore Backup Storage

Offsite backup is more demanding to maintain and archive. It may be slower to obtain and recover data this way. However, data is offsite and not subject to fire or other disaster to the workplace. You should always include an offsite backup in any solution as it is generally the last option before costly recovery or total data loss.

SOLUTION Level/Type 7 – Data Recovery
Used when Backups have failed or were never done. Can be attempted on any media. Not guaranteed to work. Data retrieved may be unusable. Risky, do not depend on it. Yet you should have a contingency plan in place for this option. Accidents and bad luck happen.

SOLUTION Level/Type 8 – Hard Copy
All planning and procedures to protect, retrieve, recover and restore data have failed. You must now go back to the original paperwork and re-enter all data manually. Same thing as not having a backup. This is the most costly of all possibilities in time, money and duplicated productivity.

Lets say you had a Computer Storefront. Why not provide 24/7 consumer parts by setting up a vending machine with common parts and supplies out front? Here is a prototype;

Next, you franchise the locations out then manage each one with technology. Microsoft did a prototype scenario of how to manage this in July of 2008. Here are their results;

Scenario

The project was based on a scenario in which a vending machine sales person obtains the proposal documents based on new candidate locations for vending machine installations and has a meeting with the landowner.

• The sales person looks for candidate locations for installing new vending machines in his/her territory.

• S/he enters the information about the candidate locations into an Office Excel 2007 form using his/her UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC).

• The submitted Excel files are saved in SharePoint Server document library.

• Based on the information entered in the form, the in-house system extracts the sales forecast information on the candidate locations from the BI system as well as the available machine types suitable for the locations from the LOB system, and automatically generates a proposal summary and an installment proposal using Office Excel 2007. The generated documents are then sent to the sales person.

• The auto generated Excel file is saved in the document library and sent to the sales person via e-mail.

• The sales person verifies the contents of the proposal summary received in his/her Office Outlook 2007 inbox using the text-to-speech functionality, and prints the installment proposal for a sales meeting with the landowner of candidate locations.

The system based on the scenario above was built using existing solutions from the wipse Open XML working group member companies.

System Components

Recently after doing some spring cleaning I was left with several empty plastic containers and decided to get creative with them. I mixed and matched some ideas and finally came up with a way to mix the boxes into a great storage bin system. I combined larger hanging file plastic boxes with smaller plastic bins to go inside of them. This looked liked someone should have already been doing something like this so I looked around and found a few off the shelf items that you can also put into a hanging file box.

You can mix the inside bins for different purposes. You can have hanging files, hanging project boxes, hanging parts bins and hanging CD holders. I have the file boxes with the lids that open on each side making it easy to access in a trunk. If you have more than one service vehicle then you can standardize the boxes and contents and duplicate for each tech. It makes inventory much easier than nothing of course.

Here are the results in pictures;

Documentation is critical for professional support of a client. Without it, you will always be relearning a clients network over and over again at their expense. Here is a form example that you can use to record important client network configuration info.