Small Business Doer

Can I afford to hire a professional, can I afford not to?

That is the question that entrepreneurs often find themselves asking, well, themselves. When you’re the boss you wear lots of hats. You’ll have to know which ones you can rock, which ones you wouldn’t be caught dead in, which ones you have to wear because it’s sunny outside, and lastly, which hats you can afford.

The point is that there are so many things to do in a small business. You can’t possibly like or be great at all of those things and you very well can’t afford to hire a pro to do them all for you.

To try and help people figure out what they can handle on their own vs what they best leave to someone else, I’m creating a series of video interviews called “DIY or Go Pro”. I will interview professionals that offer services to small businesses and get their tips on how to do-it-yourself, reasons you might not want to, and what you should look for when hiring a professional. A sample of the types of professionals I will initially interview will be:

• bookkeepers
• accountants
• graphic designers
• marketers
• website developers
• video producers
• printers
• bankers

I’ll start off first with my area of expertise, video, and then go from there.

If you’re a professional small business service provider and have some advice to give, please let me know. There are plenty of perks. Among them are:

1. It’s free, besides your time of course.
2. You get some street cred as a professional, which you are.
3. You get a professionaly produced video of yourself, which helps with point 2 and acts as a marketing tool for yourself.
4. You’ll get a link to your website from the smallbusinessdoer.com site. Remember, a diversity of good links helps with your SEO (search engine optimization).
5. Last but not least, you get what you give. It’s always good to give.

You can contact me at greg at smallbusinessdoer.com or 778.386.9877.

My DIY or Go Pro post will be up shortly!

no comments
tagged as diy or go pro, howto, vancouver, vancouver video, video, videographer

Have you received a notice in the mail to renew your domain? I did.

Domain names are such an important part of my brand and business. Accordingly, I checked the pay date, noticed I had a few months, and put the letter in my pay bills folder.

When I looked at the “bill”, I realized the price was way higher than I usually pay and I figured I would register through my registrar instead of through this Canadian registry. I thought it was a case of going through a third party to get the same product for cheaper. I then went to my registrar, www.domainsatcost.ca, and renewed my domain at 1/3 the price of the “bill”.

If I had even taken a minute to carefully look at the letter at the start I would have realized it was a solicitation letter by another domain name registrar, Domain Registry of Canada, suggesting that I switch to using them.

I’m versed enough with the online world that I didn’t come close to paying the “bill”.

However, if one were not Internet savvy, I could see someone unknowingly falling for this type of letter. The registrar who writes these solicitation letters has already gotten into trouble for this.

If you look again at the letter above, at first glance I’m sure many people would assume it is a renewal bill to pay.

Some domain name registration tips

1. If you’re paying over $15 a month for a .ca or .com address, you’re probably paying too much**.
2. Make sure that you renew with your registrar and nowhere else, unless you want to switch.
3. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority is the official .ca authority. You don’t actually use them to register your domain name, but it is the the registrar companies you use that send your information to the CIRA. A quote from the CIRA website.
   

   Registrars provide the registration information to CIRA. Once a domain has been approved and registered by CIRA, CIRA adds this information to what is called a “zone file,” which allows computers to route Internet traffic to and from domains around the world.

4. The registrar companies pay the CIRA a flat rate every year for the registration, there is no difference in names, a .ca is a .ca. It is not like municipal business licenses where the price varies depending on location, size, and type of business.
5. The CIRA has a list of approved registrars. I went through a random sample of 7 and found that prices ranged from $12.95 to $80 a year. As far as I know, there is no advantage/reason to pay more for your domain**. In the event that your registrar were to ever go out of business, your name is still safe with the CIRA.
6. I use domainsatcost.ca and have done so for the past 4 years without a single problem. There is also godaddy.com $11.90 for .com and $13.51 for .ca in comparison to $14.95 for a .com and $12.95 for a .ca from domainsatcost.ca.
7. The CIRA has a fantastic FAQ on registering your domain in Canada. It is not necessary to read this FAQ in order to register a domain, but if you want to know more about how it works, this is straight from the horse’s mouth.
8. At http://www.domainwarning.com/ you will find a good list of things to look for in a domain registrar. If you scroll to the bottom you’ll realize it is made by a registrar. They are more expensive than the two registrar’s I listed above, but they also have their reasoning and seem pretty legit.

** My Internet savvy doesn’t go so far as to know why I’d pay more for a registrar and after looking at http://www.domainwarning.com I believe that my registrar is giving me everything I need. As a small business with a site that is currently not heavily trafficked,I don’t know why I’d pay the more $$ at this point. If anyone can tell me the benefits as to why, I’d be willing to switch my position.

no comments
tagged as domain, droc.ca, registrar, registry, renewal, scam

How do I grow my business?

That was the question I set to answer in July. After a year in business working primarily as a sub-contractor for others, I’ve decided to make the leap and start taking on more work of my own. This doesn’t mean that I’ll stop doing sub-contracting work, but it does mean I’ll be slowly shifting where I receive most of my business from.

July was fairly close in sales to June, coming in at $5,137.50. Despite not having many pre-booking for July, worked seemed to roll in.

Budget

Wow, my budget is out of wack. Net income is down!

Not to fear, the lower income it is due to that new plan mentioned above and is the result mainly of equipment purchases, namely $1,200 more in equipment purchases than budgeted. Instead of having my payments spread out under the “Equipment Rental” Category, a lot of the money came out at once under the “Equipment Expense Category”.

Also, what you don’t see in the budget is the capital expenditures, as that doesn’t hit the Profit & Loss but rather the Balance Sheet (which is not published online). That line contains an extra $3,500 worth of expenses that will be written off as a depreciation expense over the period of a few years.

All of that additional money was to purchase a DSLR camera (that I will use as a video camera).

Conclusion

I’m going to be busier. Even if I didn’t get one more lick of work, I’m going to be busier setting up and working on my additional plans for the business.

Profit & Loss Budget vs. Actual – June 2010

Profit & Loss Budget vs. Actual – July 2010

no comments
tagged as budget, business plan, financials, profit and loss, small business, update

Planning is good, planning is great, but unless you act on a plan nothing happens. That’s why I’ve amended my business plan by adding an action plan. This will be a list of actions I have to take in order to achieve the goals set out in my business plan.

I’m going to do this for a single month at a time, starting with August. As these items will be more specific than a business plan and I don’t want to do this too many months in advance.

1. Attend 2 networking meetings
2. Write 4 blog posts on Small Business Doer (with minimum of 2 local small business professional interviews)
3. Write 2 guest posts on other websites
4. Do a total of 3 sample local small business videos to build up portfolio.
5. Launch smalbizvids.ca by end of August.
   1. Need site design (WordPress)
   2. Need 3 sample videos
6. Do SEO work on www.handypeter.com and www.bcpva.com domains (get 5 new inbound links for each site)
7. Find 10 business related websites to interact with / comment on. For the purpose of gaining knowledge and forming relationships

These actions relate to my strategy of being active in the online and offline community. This follows the you get what you give ethos. When it comes to things online, I’ve been more of a spectator than a participant, and I have to start participating and contributing more.

no comments
tagged as action plan, business plan

The Internet and video are becoming ever more important vehicles for small business promotion. It makes sense to me that the best product I can offer right now with my skill set, experience, and passion, is to make local small business videos. Why?

• First off, I love small business. On second thought, I don’t love small business. Love is something I have for my wife and children. However, I do spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about small business, so the desire to make them do well is there.
• I’ve owned and managed small businesses, so I know the struggles and constraints, the laughter the tears, the fun of it all.
• I produce videos, nice videos, so I can do the job and do it well.
• I specialized in marketing in university, which means less than you think, but people like paper work, especially fancy pieces of paper that you can hang on a wall.

I produce all sorts of videos, including promotional videos, as a subcontractor for video production companies. With a website, camera gear, and the right connections, I can be my own production company. The biggest thing holding me back was that I know it takes a lot of ground work and promotional effort to get your name out there and to set up shop. Once you get going, producing the videos is straight forward, it is something I already do.

In a sense, this plan is a mini business plan.

• I need to have financials in mind in terms of how much revenue I plan to bring in and how much expenses I will need to incur to get that revenue.
• I also need to have a marketing plan to attract the customers and figure out a pricing strategy.
• I need an operational plan that will outline how I will produce the videos and with what gear.

Marketing Plan

Identification of Need

When thinking of a new business idea, I usually start with the marketing, since if there’s no market for the product, their is no point in trying to make a business out of it. I’ve always felt video was a powerful communication medium and can pack more punch per viewer minute than text or photos. However, distributing videos usually made it too expensive for the producer or time consuming for the consumer. Previously, to get your videos seen by the public, you had to put it on TV. That’s expensive and not very focused. You could also mail it out in a physical format such as a CD or DVD. Again, expensive, but more focused. Although, what consumer would go through the hassle of popping in that CD or DVD. Only that consumers who was interested in your product or service.

With this new-fangled thing called the Internet, the landscape for videos changed, but not that drastically at first. It was expensive to have video online, the quality sucked, it took long to load, and that’s if you had the right software on your computer. It wasn’t great. Fast forward to 2010 and it is much different. Online video is everywhere. The greatest example is Youtube. It’s free, fast, has adjustable quality, and plays on most every computer and mobile device.

The demand for online videos is growing, and video is now a truly accessible and viable solution for small businesses trying to promote themselves. You have articles like this and guys like this talking about the growth of online video. That’s only two sources. I’ve read, but more importantly seen, hundreds of examples and there is no doubt that this is a growing sector, and more importantly, a great way for small businesses to promote themselves.

Marketing Strategy

Online. That’s the main crux of the strategy. Push eyeballs to an online website that focuses on promoting the small business videos that I produce. I have a url for a website, www.smalbizvids.ca. The more important part of having that website is getting traffic. That will be done in a variety of ways.

1. Be active in the online community. Post articles on other websites with link backs to the smallbizvids.ca website. This not only gets traffic, but just as important, increases the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking getting me more targeted traffic, when someone searches for small business videos in a search engine like Google. I have sites that I currently post on which are the BCPVA (BC Professional Videographers Association) and this site (Small Business Doer).
2. Be active in the offline community aka the real world. Attend networking meetings and events. This will help me connect with small businesses in the target market I want. One thing I want to do for the www.smallbusinessdoer.com site is to do interviews with small business owners, having them share their experience and expertise. This will help get links, traffic, and awareness to the small business videos that I offer.
3. Initial product launch. Have a fantastic initial offer to do up 3 videos for companies. They get great value for the dollar and it will help build up a portfolio for my site.

Pricing Strategy

This one I debated with myself for a long time. I’ve come down to $1,000 for a basic, but fantastic, video. This is a half-day shoot in one location with one camera and would include the editing into a 30 second to 2 minute online video. Extra things, such as a second camera, voice over, actors, stock photography or footage, motion graphics, would be more. I liked the $1,000 price as I felt it makes the video a great value to a small business owner and would be a good wage for me for a days worth of work. My goal is that I’ll be able to deliver a product that is worth $2,000 for the price of $1,000. I plan to do this by keeping what I offer very focused as well as being very good at what I do. I want to be so good at this that it takes me less time to do the local small business video than the other video companies and produces better results.

Operational Plan

This largely involves getting the right equipment. The actual work is no different than what I already do with video production. The equipment I need is a HDSLR camera that shoots video (for those sexy film-like shots) and an editing system that can handle the HD footage. I spent several months researching this and finally took the plunge in July to get this equipment. Luckily, I already have access to a lot of additional equipment (microphone, tripod, lights) and only needed to make upgrades to my editing system. So the total cost was easily less than half, probably a third of what I would have had to pay if starting from scratch.

Financial Plan

The difficult thing for me was to define what time frame I wanted to give for recouping my investment in money and time. I figure that in 6 months, I would need to pull in double the amount that it cost me to pursue the local small business videos plan in order for me to consider it a worthwhile investment.

The video production equipment that I have planned to spend is roughly $6,000, give or take $1,000. As mentioned previously, the total value of equipment I will use is $15,000, but since I already have or have access to the additional equipment, I have that advantage of not having to shell out the additional $9,000.

This means that in 6 months, I would have to take in $12,000, which is 12 videos. In other words, 2 videos worth $2,000 a month. Not a crazy target.

How does this make sense in contrast to what I’m already doing with my subcontracted work?
I make $50 an hour when doing subcontract work for other people. I anticipate the small business production will take me 10 hours of work. So, as a subcontractor I would make $500, as a producer I make $1,000. I double the rate I make. However, I also increase the costs, as noted in the additional equipment investment, I have to spend time and money on marketing, and have to spend time organizing the shoots. I’ve purposely made the shoots a simple half-day shoot affair, so that this will be minimal.

In the end, the first 6 months I’m no better off than if I had done the work as a subcontractor. After that, the extra money is gravy, as long as I get the business

Conclusion of the Local Small Business Video Plan

This is somethings that I’ve jumped into and decided to pursue. The pressure will really be on to get a website up and running and get those initial contracts. I will have to spend a lot of time at the start to get this setup, and then continue to spend time on this to maintain it. I will need an action plan for all the steps I’ll need to take, which will be in a upcoming post.

3 comments
tagged as business plan, local, Lower mainland, online, smal business, vancouver, video