Some interesting figures:

1. By 2013, Australia’s online retail sector is expected to grow th $36.8 billion per annum ¹
2. 59% of Australian small businesses do not have a website ¹

It’s not rocket science – Australian consumers look for websites to help them make a decision. The website doesn’t need to have bells and whistles, it just needs to provide more info than a flyer or recommendation or advert can convey.

As Australians are catching up with other first world countries in terms of internet access speeds (thanks in large part to the coming NBN), the sky is limit in terms of the amount of efficiencies that can be had by embracing web based software and the growing array of devices that allow you to get online.

¹ PayPal’s research report ‘eCommerce: Secure Insight’ developed in conjunction with Forrester Research
and The Leading Edge.

This post is part of our business processes series, looking at the strategies and ideas implemented at Thomas Multimedia.

Having constraints and limitations are a good thing – they encourage creativity.

• What can be achieved in 3 weeks if a result is required?
• What can 4 people achieve instead of 20?

Constraints force us to focus on the core problem, rather than waste time on peripheral issues.

Who can honestly say that their greatest achievements were not the result of overcoming a challenge?

Good Ideas…

Are great for inspiration, but absolutely worthless for getting to the end goal. Good ideas translate into success through good execution.

Good Execution…

The result of good planning and completing a succession of bite sized, tangible goals.

Perhaps this post sums it up best.

How hard is it for the self reliant, self employed to make an educated decision about when a piece of work can realistically be completed?

Let me say from personal experience its hard. But it doesn’t have to be – you just need a reliable web service that keeps your schedule a mouse click away.

Studiotime, our time management software for the self employed, has just received a major improvement to assist in managing time more efficiently.

This ties directly in with the new estimates feature on to-do items.

In a nutshell, you can now make an informed decision about when you will complete a task based on how much other work you have allocated for that day. A simple colour coding scheme shows completely free days in green, half booked days in orange, and fully booked days in red.

In the past 12 months (Nov 2009 – Nov 2010), 53% of Australian adults have made a purchase online!

Of those online shoppers, virtually all had made purchases from Australian websites, while only a small percentage did not buy from Australian websites.

With strong growth across all sectors of online shopping, and the long path for most websites to make an impact online, now is the time to get your business online, or to get your existing website up to date with fast paced online technologies.

source

This post is part of our business processes series, looking at the strategies and ideas implemented at Thomas Multimedia.

When in doubt, follow the simple path – Keep it Simple

Adding a single element of complexity has a shock wave effect. All of a sudden, this shock wave is causing negative repercussions all over the project.

Keeping a project simple involves tough decisions, but it is infinitely harder, more costly and more time consuming supporting a complicated product.

It is easy to make something complicated; it’s much harder to cut through the crap and find out the better, simpler solution. In the long run it always pays off to invest the time to find the right solution to a problem.

This post is part of our business processes series, looking at the strategies and ideas implemented at Thomas Multimedia.

Create systems for every possible procedure that the business will encounter. This allows people with the lowest possible skills to follow a procedure and produce a predictable, consistent, high quality result.

Think of how McDonalds hires unskilled teenagers and efficiently produces a consistent range of products worldwide. As a former teenage employee of McDonalds I can tell you precisely why our otherwise rag tag team could produce a big mac, exactly the same, in a blistering time, over and over again.

1. Rack up buns on a tray, separating bottom and middle sections, and placing top (crown) on a large spatula
2. Insert lower and middle buns into toaster
3. After about 30 seconds, buns are toasted. Insert crown. Remove bottom and middle bun from toaster. Add cardboard ring around lower bun.
4. Lay as many meat patties as required (2 per burger) onto the double side grill and lower lid. Meat takes 42 seconds to cook.
5. Commence dressing middle and bottom buns with big mac sauce, onions, lettuce. 1x cheese on bottom, 2x pickles on middle.
6. Move tray to grill, before or as grill lid is automatically opening after its cooking time has completed. Add meat.
7. Get crowns from toaster, add to top, wrap and place in production chute.
8. Scrape grill, and repeat the whole process from step 1 again.

I haven’t worked inside a McDonalds since about 2003, and yet the process to create every burger of the day is still stuck like glue in my head. Clearly the head office has recently found further ways to optimize this process, now pre-cooking and using warmers to keep the meat, and dressing the burger at order time rather than using a… Read more

Thomas Multimedia’s web auction software TM Auctions, has been available on a monthly price basis for about 12 months.

While their was a fair amount of interest in that time period – with virtually zero active marketing from our end – including several new auction sites being launched,  some things quickly became evident:

• An auction site needs regular love and attention
• An auction site needs a strong existing business and existing customer base
• A site owner needs to be driven and expend energy getting their site to the target market

What we found is  that we need to target stronger,  better resourced, better dedicated businesses as opposed to the smaller startups who are probably doing this part time or as a side project.

Frankly, I can’t stand to see an auction site go down the gurgler, even if the loss of time and expense was minimal.

Analysing my own mistakes, the target market was wrong.  By lowering the barrier of entry to a starting price of $49 a month, combined with a free 30 day trial, I was attracting the smallest end of business who thought they could enter the e-commerce market without anymore than a small monthly fee. As time has shown, this is not the case; as a site owner, you need to know how to sell, and you need to know how to build up a membership base.

To address this misconception, TM Auctions as a product has been redefined.

The new emphasis is to target stronger established businesses, who have the resources to dedicate man hours and budget towards a stronger push onto the market. This most certainly is a combination of a strong marketing campaign, and an existing customer base to direct toward the auction site. An existing website with steady traffic is… Read more

Following the recent feature to specify a due date for a to-do item, A new filter has been added to the Studiotime to-do manager page, allowing you to filter based on items due today, tomorrow and overdue.

This is a great way to setup a quick one day list to progress through over the course of your work day.

Studiotime is an easy to use web application to manage your business time, tasks and invoices from your web browser.

Studiotime now supports due dates on tasks .

Due dates follow the same simple colour coding as task priorities:

- Red indicates the task has a due date within the next 3 days
- Orange indicates the task has a due date in the next 4-7 days

Due dates more than 7 days away do not have any highlighting.

This is a great way to further improve your workflow, prioritise and schedule ahead using Studiotime.

Get started with Studiotime to manage your business time – its free to signup and you can scale your account as you go.

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