Business Built Freedom

Embrace Your Competition

$3 a kilo, $3 a kilo, $3 a kilo, $3 a kilo!Oi, they're selling bananas over there for $3 a kilo. What are we going to do? Oh, we'll do it for $2 a kilo.$2 a kilo, $2 a kilo, $2 a kilo.Oh no. Now they've mimicked us and they're doing it for $2 a kilo. What are we going to do? The answer isn't drive your prices down. You need to embrace your competition. Make sure that you're one with your competition. Become one with your competition. Yes. I can see the light.

Learn more about running a small business at dorksdelivered.com.au

Don’t Drive Down Your Bottomline

When you finally embrace your competition and talk with them, go out with them for a beer, catch up with him for a coffee, whatever the thing is that you'd like to do, catch up with them and talk with them. You'll find that they're not bad people. They're all in the same game and the last thing you want to do is drive down your bottom line. It's a terrible way to run your business and it's cutthroat. If that's the only difference that you have to your competitors, you should stop selling bananas, because you'll go bananas.

Make a Difference Between You and Your Competition

Credit different point of difference around what it is that you do, the voodoo that you do. If you're able to change what it is that sets you apart, you're going to be in a completely different level to them and then they're no longer going to be your competition. If you're the great company that sells vegan pies and they're the great company that sells super duper meat pies, have that known. Even if you sell meat pies and even if they sell vegan pies, being able to separate yourself out gives you a different audience. And when you've got a different audience that you're marketing to, you no longer have competition. You don't have to be driving down your price.

Catch Up With Them, You Knew Know What Could Happen

I sincerely suggest going out and catching up for a beer, as I said with one of your competitors and just talk to them. I try it maybe once every two months, I'll catch up with a competitor, sit down and talk with them, see how they're going, the different tools they're using, what things they're doing in their business and we know it's a friendly thing. In fact, we've even set up joint ventures with them where we've been able to make sure there's noncompetes in place and if there's larger projects that we're doing or they're doing, we use each other to flow from one to another. That means that we both don't need the overhead of an extra employee or extra group of employees for those times that you have bigger projects and we can use and utilise the workforce that we've got. Being in business is all about being resourceful. There's nearly never a lack of resources. It's just about being resourceful and becoming resourceful and having resourcefulness in your business. If you're able to do that and embrace the resourcefulness movement, you'll be able to really go forward in leaps and bounds.

Look At The Positives

Don't think about why it doesn't work. Think about a way that you can make it work for you. Don't go out of business driving your prices down, cutting out your profit and shooting yourself in the foot. You'd be crazier than a monkey's uncle to do that. As I was saying earlier, you'll go bananas. You'll end up selling the bananas cheaper than you bought them. So don't go down that path. Make sure you look at your point of difference, talk with your competitors and see. Their audience might be completely different to yours. I know a lot of the time we'll be doing IT support and business automation for a certain group of companies that are relying on certain verticals, and then there's other companies that are in IT that use the same tool sets, have a fantastic workforce and when we sit down and talk with them, maybe sometimes after a user group meeting or something like that, you find that they're in a completely different industry and they're reliant upon the gambling or medical industry more so than the manufacturing. You think, well, we're never going to be in a position where we're running into each other. Let's use each other's networks and collaborate together to grow each other's business. Reach out to your competitor. I dare you.

The Final Word

Make a relationship, make a difference, and turn them into a friend and someone who is no longer a competitor, but instead compassionate completion of your business. I hope you've enjoyed this and if you have made sure to jump over to iTunes, give us some love, leave us some feedback and stay good.

Travelling With Your Business

So you're at that spot in your business, you've decided to go travelling. Your business is all set up, you've listened to everything I've said, you've got fantastic documentation processes, you've got great accountability practices and all of your staff are ready to see you leave, bon voyage. So, you've now decided what do you pack? What if something goes wrong? How do you do this? Your mind is stressing out. You might have started the business six months ago, six years ago, it doesn't matter. You've decided to make a thing of it, and now you're working out how you can actually do that. Well, what I found when I went travelling for the first time, which I'll be happy to admit, the first time I travelled overseas after starting my business I'd been in business for 10 1/2 years.

Read more about running your business while travelling dorksdelivered.com.au

Evaluate What Could Go Wrong

So, it took me a bit of time and courage to get up there, but what I did is I looked and I thought, "What can break around here?" And I went, "Okay, there's a single point of failure there." What could break? It could be anything from hardware to staff members. You need to make sure that you've got all your bases covered. Once you've done that and you've got all those bits back ups, just in case something goes wrong, the next step is working out what to take.

What Do You Need?

What do you need with you? Obviously depending on the business it changes. I've got the YouTube channel happening, and that means that I need to carry around a green screen with me as I go travelling. Woo hoo. Extra luggage. We can get collapsible stuff like that. All my different camera equipment and everything else I have to carry around with, but it all depends on your business and how that runs. Most of the time you can get everything running from a laptop. You want to make sure it's a laptop that you're comfortable with that's small enough to get a handle, carry around with you everywhere, and not become cumbersome. So, I've got a 17 inch massive beast of a laptop, and when I went travelling I upgraded to a 13 inch with a much better specification, but ultimately much lighter, and that keeps me able to check in my bags wherever I go and make sure that I'm able to keep on top of the weight restrictions and not be lugging around something on my back that's costing me my spine later on in life.

Think About Software

From a software perspective, you need to think about what do you need when you go travelling. I would suggest you speak to your IT company and get a VPN put in place so you can connect back into work in a secure way, also use two factor authentications so that you're able to use either your phone as a second aid of authentication or possibly one of those dongles so that you're able to still connect in and stay very secure. If you're business is very service based or physically based, you need to make sure that the hierarchy of people that are reporting to you comes back to one person for you to discuss and have everything channelled through. Otherwise, it's going to be a headache.

Try a Holiday Test Run

Now, you've got everything packed. You're nice and secured. You might have done a test run. This is what I did. I did a test holiday only a few kilometres away from the office for two months before I went over to America for 10 weeks. When I did that I made sure that if anything was to go wrong it was picked up in those two months and I was able to guide the appropriate people through. So, doing a test holiday first will definitely help you relax on the real holiday. I'll be the first to say, we have a very, very good setup, great infrastructure between our Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne data centres, but I did see one weak point and go, "Hmm, if that router was to blow up, that could cause us some gripe."So, I thought, "What can we do to fix that?"I went out just to have one sitting on the shelf and spent about $1200 to have this device just sitting there just in case. Low and behold I'm in Vegas after one of the networking meetings and I get an email saying that the router is down and I'm thinking, "Yes, finally, some pre-planning that prevented a problem." I already had the processes in place and we're able to have that whole thing replaced and fixed remotely, which is fantastic, because it meant less down time, less travel in between places and less stress, which is ultimately why you're going on holiday to have a fun experience, and to have less stress.

Get Unlimited Data

Now, I suggest when you land at your destination check around to see what sort of plans are about. Grab yourself an unlimited DIM SIM, and when I get that SIM and I pop that DIM SIM in, I find myself no longer hungry for data. You're then connected back to the real world, back to wherever your home base is, and you're able to monitor and manage everything remotely. It might not seem like much, but just having a few things in place making sure you've got a light laptop that has long battery hours and you've got a secure connection back to the office.

Don’t Connect to Free WiFi

Don't connect to free WiFi. It is free for a reason, and you're the product. If it's free, you're the product, and if it is free they're probably taking your information. I had a client that decided to connect in remotely on a free WiFi point without any security in place, and didn't end well for them, but nevertheless, be diligent. Think about what you're doing. Why is it free? Just buy the dongle. It's so much cheaper, even if it's $90-100 a month it's cheaper and for the peace of mind knowing that you're on a secure connection over that 4G or whatever the dongle is at the time that you're listening to this. It's going to just make your life a lot easier.

The Final Word

So they are my hints and tips. Nothing too crazy. Nothing you'd be like, "Oh, wow. That's revolutionary. Why didn't I think of that?" But definitely things that will help when the process of planning for your holiday, so have a pre-holiday near where you actually work, have a light luggage, secure connection, and you should be on the way. I hope you've enjoyed this, stay good.

Today, we're going to talk about social pressures, conformity, and the “last biscuit” controversy. So, what that is, at dinners and all around the place, is this last piece of cheese or this last piece of pizza, and everyone's eating it the same way, and all of a sudden it goes whoop, and they don't have the last piece of whatever it is.

Read more about makers and takers: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/271-are-you-a-maker-or-a-taker 

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fWFE4tMn3_4

Everyone feels like it's not socially responsible to eat the last piece because that could be someone else who ate less, especially if you've been gluttonous at the time, but no one wants to take the last piece.

"No, you have it."

"You have it."

"Oh, no, you have it."

"Oh, we'll halve it. We'll halve it."

That's a great outcome to halve it if there's two people, but you have to think about how this applies to your business. Are you the type of person that takes the first piece? Or are you the type of person that takes the last piece? Or you take the first piece and you thought, "Someone will take the last piece, but you can be the gluttonous guy."

Depending on how you are in business, most leaders and everyone else that I know in business, that's doing well in business, has done well because they've fed their staff, they've fed their family in their business before they put food on the table for themselves. They've taken the last bit, if there is a last bit to be taken. Sometimes they don't eat, and that isn't a metaphor.

If you are the type of person that goes, "Stuff that, I'm going to take the first piece," you can still go along in business quite well. You have to think, though, are you a maker or are you a taker?

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fWFE4tMn3_4

Makers are the people that make things happen. They make things. They make inventions. They make processes. They make environments that are friendly for people to work in. They make all of this cool stuff. 

Takers are the ones that take it from them. Takers will look at what you've made, and they'll take it, and they'll use it, and then they will exploit it.

Both are very profitable, but a maker is generally not as profitable as a taker.

A good example of a historic maker would be Nikola Tesla—not the Tesla dude with his cars at the moment, he's a different guy. Elon Musk made a vehicle called the Tesla, annoyingly.

Nikola Tesla made lots of stuff. In your home, there'd be dozens of things made by Nikola Tesla. Your home is powered by the things that he created. Your microwave has technology from Nikola Tesla. Your radios, your mobile phones, all sorts of stuff have stuff from Nikola Tesla. He made lots of stuff. He died poor with pigeons.

That's very different from the story of someone like Thomas Edison, who didn't make the light bulb. He made a version of the light bulb that wasn't very good and then used engineers' knowledge to refine it and make it better. Again, there's nothing wrong with doing that, but he had a different mindset—a modern, recently deceased, maker verse taker.

I would like to see what you guys think. Do you think Elon Musk is a maker or a taker? Do you think Bill Gates is a maker or a taker? And, do you think Steve Jobs was a maker or a taker? Something to think about. I'll let you know in the next episode. Thank you.

How to Manage Your Time

We're going to be talking about repetition, time management and making sure you're making the most of your time and not doing things twice or two times. I promise I won't do that again. Sorry, not sorry.

Read more about productivity and efficiency at dorksdelivered.com.au

Document Things Down!

So, how do you make sure that you're not going to do the same task twice? You not going tobe wasting time doing the same mundane task and the way I would suggest to do that is by documenting it down. Yes, I know, no one likes doing that but we all should be. It's my main pain and, what I think really has been my main gain by being able to document so much as I do. Because, once you've got stuff documented down, you don't have to do it again. All of our computer systems and the whole way that we manage our clients, we fix a problem, if we are able to monitor for that problem, we can then create the script to make sure that problem never happens again. You might think, you know that's going totake ages. So, let's say there's a password pop up box or something like that that comes up with Outlook. We have a client call up about it. If we can work out a way to monitor for that situation that that occurred, and then stop that occurring, and we do that on a network of over a thousand machines, we have a thousand less calls.

It All Adds Up

Even though, to fix the problem might only take a minute or two minutes, if I have a thousand calls come through to the call systems here, our technicians are going to have the shits and it's such a boring task. So, instead, we'll spend an hour or two hours creating a script to stop that happening. So, if we spend two hours we could've fixed that same thing 60 times. But, instead, if the total yield is higher by having a thousand end points being managed, then we already know that we're in a better spot. You can relate that to any task that you do. The way that I like to manage my time and really put value on my time is, look at what I would like to earn per year then know what's realistic to be out of work. And then, know the times that you're not working you could still be getting paid that dollar figure. And, that figure could be anything. It could be $20, $50, $100, $500. For nice round numbers, let's call it $100 an hour.If you're getting paid $100 an hour, all the time, or just while you're working. Let's call it just while you're working for eight hours a day, $800 a day. $4,000 a week. If you're getting $4,000 in a week and then you realise that you're not working the full eight hours or you're doing other stuff. Or, that, I mean and isn't what you want. The amount of time that you're spending on other tasks, you gain a lot of respect to the value of what they cost you.

Time Management

If you're able to be invoicing a client while you're working with them at X amount and instead, you're mowing the lawn, and that takes you two hours. That task list is getting bigger, you better off getting someone else to come in and mow the lawn. And, it's obviously different for every business and every situation. But, time management is very, very important. First things first, you need to know where you're spending your time. That's a hard one. A lot of people go, "Aw, you know, I'm just working." But, unless you're able to go down and drill down per minute, per 15 minutes, per hour, you don't really know what you're working on or how long tasks are taking you. We use internally, several tools. One is ObserveIT, another isManicTime and the final one isRescueTime. Theygive us input into how much time we're spending on our phones, on phone calls, in Outlook, on different websites, in different customer programmes, responding to customer requests, as well as in our own documentation systems, reviewing videos or whatever it is that we're doing.

How Are Employees Wasting Time?

We can see very quickly and very easily how much time is wasted in different tasks. You might have a policy at work where you're able to have your employees use Facebook. And, you might think, ah, it's just because I'm a cool boss, and that's what cool bosses do. Right on. Diggity cool, virtual high five. But, in fact, looking through the data, you'll find that your employees are on there, even if it's like, oh, I'm just on there for 10 minutes. They're on there for 10 minutes, 12 times a day and they don't even realise that all of a sudden, two hours of productivity is down the drainper employee. That is the numbers that we found from real customers. They are big numbers. That's a lot of money that you're paying your staff to look at Facebook. I'm not saying they shouldn't do it. But, being aware of it at least lets you hone in and take control of the situation making it as a benefit and not a liability.

Move On To Optimising

Similar things, as soon as you can start managing your time, you can have a look at how long things are taking. So, maybe you're old school and you still on mild and you haven't moved across to zero. Or, maybe you're on zero and you're looking to get a new plug in or add on that's going to make your life even easier. Being able to see how long every task is taking around the product. So, if you're on mild and you're in there for five hours a day or six hours a day doing payroll once a week or whatever it is, you're able to see how long that's taking and then you're able to go, "Well, let's try all this other product and see how long this takes." And then, you know, straightaway, is this goingbe a benefit? Maybe it's costing you more per month, but it's going tocost you less in man hours. Or, maybe it's costing you less per month, and it was going tocost you more in man hours. Work out what works for your business but being able to measure the data is the most important thing. Time wasted is money wasted and that's ultimately wasted time that you could be spending with your family, friends, or having a beer at the pub. Whatever you want to do in your spare time, I guess.

Lists Are Very Helpful

You got to just make sure you're able to measure. If you can't measure your time, you won't be able to fix the problem. Once you know what you're spending your time on, you can then work out a method that works for you and your lifestyle to keep on top of it. So, for me, I'm a big list person. I've got everything in Outlook, I've got that in different task lists and different priority lists depending on if they're short term tasks, long term tasks, tasks that I can just do.Around the house, I've got a list of what I call beer tasks, which is tasks you can do with a beer in your hand. And then, I've got other more important tasks that you definitely want to make sure your full compass. You don't want to have a beer in your hand for some of the other tasks. But, having the lists lets you see what you want to achieve. It's really, really so fulfilling, a positive feeling. When you're having a look at this list, and you're going, "Oh, wow, look how many things I've been able to tick off of that," and you can see that you've actually done those things, makes you feel good, as well. But, you're able to plan out your whole day. You can schedule everything out and if you don't get them all done, it doesn't matter because you know you'll fully utilise working on those tasks. You also need to be able to take into account the interruptions.

Account for Interruptions

Dun, dun, dun. The naughty, devilish interruptions that cause havoc in every business. It's always interruptions that come up. And, like an aeroplane or an airline that overbooks an aeroplane, they've accounted for the fact that there's going to be people and problems and so they make sure that they're able to overcome it by overbooking the aeroplane. The same thing, if you notice that you're getting interrupted and it's an on average two hours a day, you can hone in and own those interruptions by scheduling them in and writing them into your task lists. Not as a task, but as something that you're aware that's going to happen. That way, you're not getting negative about the whole process going, "Uh, didn't get everything finished today." And, it can sometimes get the better of you. But, being able to look at the tasks, understand what you need to do, having it very easy and written in front of you really makes things straightforward, to be able to make a difference and get some ticks in those boxes. Some days it works, some days it's just full of disruptions and interruptions. But, overall, you've got to see yourself succeeding and own your own time. And hopefully, with a bit of automation you won't have to have double data entry. That's going to save you heaps of time. You're goingown those systems and everyone is going to be fully accountable and that is gonna save you hours of time.

Read More About Efficiency: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/342-how-to-manage-your-time

The Final Word

I hope you've enjoyed this. And, it's been a ripper of an episode. I've enjoyed just talking about it. I feel like it's cost me a bit of time, but it's probably saved a lot of time for everyone else. If you have enjoyed it, jump across to iTunes and leave us a review, it would be very appreciated. Stay good.

Tough Employee Conversations

Congratulations! You've reached that time in your business where you have to have a tough employee conversation. Yuck. No one likes this, and if you've got a great team behind you (I'm lucky enough to have a team of unicorns) you don't have to have the discussions too often, but it still happens. When it does happen you need to be able to have that conversation. Delivering negative feedback isn't easy, but it's a necessary part of being a manager and a team leader. So, everything's been going swimmingly, everything looks like it's going well, yet something happens, someone ballses up somewhere, something goes wrong, a client's unhappy, their performance isn't good, their hygiene's bad. Whatever the case may be, you need to be able to have that delicate conversation, and there are many ways you can go about it.

Read more about workspace and employees at dorksdelivered.com.au 

Try Not to Offend

One of the things that I had to do early on was, we were replacing some of the office furniture, and I needed to be sure that the chairs that I was buying were going to be suitable for all of the candidates that would be sitting in them. It's very impolite to ask for anyone's weight, so the way I overcame this was handed the brochure around and asked everyone to pick the chairs that they wanted. Now, that kind of worked, except everyone wanted a Herman Miller chair. So it kind of worked, but you'd be able to look at the specifications. You don't want to offend someone, and you definitely don't want to alienate them, so having the discussion can be a difficult thing.

Have Standard Operation Procedures

What do you do if it's a problem because of a lack of working in the way they should be working, or rather not working in a position they should be working? The best way I've found is to make sure you've got supporting documentation, standard operating procedures and knowledge base articles. If you have those things, you can rely on them and say, "This is what we were meant to be doing. I appreciate the way that you've gone about doing this. Is there any reasons why this process wasn't working for you?" and then have the document molded and rectified into a way that works for them and works for you. If, for whatever reason, they can't understand the document, have them go through it, go through it with them, and then re-read and re-write the document in their words. Have them re-write it, and have them go through, so they understand the process.

Hygienic Problems

Hygiene problems can stink, and that's something that isn't as easily adhered to with a conversation that you don't want to have. You don't want to have that conversation. The conversation stinks. The whole process stinks. Just making them aware that people have brought it to your attention. You don't want them to be embarrassed, but you definitely want them to be able to fit in with the work environment in a positive way, so have them try and see the benefits. That doesn't always work, especially if they're not aware that they have a hygiene problem so you could go the blindfolded, full gun approach of just having everyone start to put a deodorant right first thing in the morning, like getting liced at school. Just do the whole class to stop embarrassing that one kid that keeps getting head lice.

Performance-Based Problems

All in all, though, if it is a performance-based problem, or you need to have a discussion around the way that something was done, the best way I find to do it is the same way a psychologist would do it, and that's have them answer the question to the problem. If you can word it so that they can see that there is a better way to do something, have them own the situation, and they'll never make the mistake again. They won't feel like they're in trouble. They'll have a lot of respect for the flow because it's something that they've created.

Try This Out

There's a fun game that I like to play at parties, where you think of a word and then you have to try and have the other person say that word without you saying that word, and they don't even know they're playing the game. A good example would be, you start talking about how beautiful the animals are in Thailand, to have them come back and say, "I love elephants," and the keyword is elephants. If you get very good at this, you can have other people say the words that you're thinking. If you get really good at this, you can then have other people start to resolve the problems that you're seeing, and have them take complete ownership over the situation, as they would have been the one that brought it up. Anyone would undeniably agree that they brought up elephants first, not you. You were just talking about animals in Thailand. So that is a process that, if you refine and you distill down, you can do really, really well in business and have people take accountability, take ownership.

The Final Word

I hope this has been of use and you can employ some of these tips in your business to make sure those yucky conversations are a little bit more pleasant. If you have enjoyed this, make sure to jump onto iTunes and leave us some fantastic feedback, and hope you're all having an awesome day. Stay good.

You're on the move again and you've decided to migrate your website. That's great news! Today, we're going to be talking about the things you need to put in place before you go about making that move.

Learn more about business websites at dorksdelivered.com.au

Change TTL Numbers

Number one, you're going to have change what's called the TTL numbers. That's called the Time To Live, and the way that it works is when your website is live and someone goes to it, your website in a way tells that end device hey, I'm not going to be changing any information here for a little while so keep these values for up to 48 hours. The numbers can change depending on the host and provider and how you set this up, but it says to keep these numbers for the next 48 hours. When you send an e-mail, the same thing. It tells that look, keep these numbers for the next 48 hours so everyone knows when you type this address in and you type in your e-mail address, it's not going to change for 48 hours. If you don't change these TTL values and you just move hosting provider, it means your e-mails or your website or any other services connected to your hosting can be done for up to that number, up to 48 hours, and it might work for you, but it might not work for other people for up to 48 hours. Then you'll be bouncing and some people will be going to the old website and some people will be going to the new one. The best bet is to change these TTL values down to 300 seconds, which is five minutes, which means the cut overtimes are only five minutes. That's nice and easy.

Back Up Host Files

Now once you've done that, you want to then back up your host files and everything that you've got with your current provider. Normally there's a backup process if they're using something that's the industry standard, such as cPanel. With cPanel you can just download your backup and then upload it to your new hosting provider. That should only take like a few minutes, maybe ten, maybe fifteen tops, depending on how big your site is. That then means that your website is ready to be migrated and you're actually putting all your files on your new server now, which is awesome.

Change MX Record

The next step is to go in and change what's called your MX records. Your MX record says where all your different mail points to, so at the moment the mail was still going to your current provider, so you want to change the MX records to the new provider. When you do that, it will point everything across to the new provider. You can then put them in a priority list so that the new provider and the old provider can both receive e-mails if one was to go down, or you can skip the whole MX records step and jump across to changing what's called your name server records.

Server Records

Now what your name server records are is where your domain name points to, so your domain name, (in this example business.com.au) points across to these name servers. The name servers are what actually tell any of the websites what to do and where DNS is and where everything else is. If you change the name server records to point to the new server, that'll then mean that everything has been cut across from a technical perspective.

Think About This

Now you might be thinking okay, awesome, so I'm cut across, everything's all sweet, but don't stop at that. It might not be sweet just yet. One of the things you need to be really well aware of is a web hosting provider isn't like every other web hosting provider, it's kind of like fuel, you can put fuel in your car but you put diesel in your car and it's not going to go anywhere unless you've got a diesel, obviously. Then if you've got petrol in your car, you're going to have problems as well. You need to make sure that all the different PHP libraries and every single other element to do with your website on the current provider are the same as the new provider.

Why Are You Moving?

You need to make sure whatever the reason is for you moving, how are they actually making that affordable? Are they overselling the hosting making a slow environment for you? Or what exactly is the reason for them to have a reduced price? Maybe call up the current hosting provider and they might be able to give you a better price or at least give you some eyes as to why there is a difference in price. Some people love filling their car up with premium and they believe that it's getting them further and faster, other people will go for the cheap as E85 or ethanol 10 and they feel that that's perfectly fine as well. It's up to you as to which way you go with it, but you want to at least know the differences and how it's going to be running with your engine, and that's what I'm talking about here, your web engine.

Assess Your Options

If it's going to make it run clunky and all over the place, you're not going to be happy with the experience. Before you look to save a couple of dollars a month, make sure that you are actually making a sound decision and you've taken everything into account and don't compare apples with oranges. A big one that happens with cheaper providers is they oversell and when they oversell that means that you're sharing the resources and details with lots of other companies. That can be perfectly fine, but it can also be a recipe for disaster because if this company has an adult themed content being served off of it, that can degrade your search engine ranking because it sees that you're using the same IP address and other resources as something that they would not particularly want to be associated with. Always ask the question before you move.

The Final Word

In closing, the things to make sure you do is change those TTL values down so you don't get two days of downtime. Make sure you understand the reason for the move and that your current provider can't give you whatever that is. Number three, be aware of who is on the server with you and you can use websites like you get your signal and you get a jump on there and be able to see who else is on your server. Be aware of it so that you're not jumping in and then your web ranking is going down and you're paying for ad words and they're going up. You just want to make sure you're on top of it. Good luck and stay good!

If there's something that business owners continuously tell me along with friends and family is that I'm one of the bubbliest characters that they know. I always seem to be happy and excited and have a go-getter attitude. That's what we are going to be talking about today. How do you stay motivated in business? You can be in business for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, a few years, or even a few decades and eventually you feel like there is a bit of fizzle. This doesn't just happen in business, it can happen in relationships, it can happen with friendships it can happen with anything. But what we need to talk about is how do you stay motivated.

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What Motivated Me to Start

Since I was a kid I was always interested in business. I was selling things at school around 14 years of age and I took that interest to the next level when I finished school. I was always just motivated by being able to control my own life. Having freedom is something that the vast majority of people aren't able to get, but it is something that is truly life-changing. Now running a business can also do the opposite. It can consume you, but if you are strategic you can have the freedom that you never would with being an employee.

Set Goals

A big thing that I find that helps to stay motivated is to set goals. This means setting small goals, medium goals, and big goals. The small goals can be something as simple as, what am I going to do today? What am I going to have for breakfast? Don't make the goals to hard, make it something that you can achieve, and make it something that you might not have done the day before. So maybe, you want to wash the car and you just do that, just do it, wash the car, and when you wash the car you'll feel like you've achieved something. That will release dopamine, that will make you happy, and that will make you look at and go "wow this is great." A great example for me, if I'm working in, and working continuously for a long period of time, I find swapping to something completely different, so if you work and you do something very creative, swapping to something that is a bit more laborious, and vice versa if you're doing something that requires a lot of heavy lifting, try doing something a bit creative or something analytical.

Break Up Your Day

For our business I'm in front of a computer for long hours every, so to motivate me and to get my mind pumping, I look doing other things. Maybe I'll go outside and plant some plants, or I could do something as simple as just running around with the music up a bit louder and just listening to the music and having a bit of a dance. As long as you're changing your mindset, even momentarily, it will refresh your whole attitude, especially if it's something positive that takes you away from it. And the reason why this is important to do is, it lets the idea simmer.

Change Your Mindset

Changing your mindset on the way that you are looking at the problem is really important, and that's why just getting up, having a dance, going for a run, planting a plant, doing something different that steps you outside of the world that you're in and the job you're focusing on, changes your mindset, changes everything. So it's really important to do that as well. When you have a list and you go to bed, the idea is still there working away in the background regardless of what you think.

Lists Are Awesome

You can have different lists and categorise them into different types of items. If you've got a list of things that may be in your business where you need to do your bookkeeping, you can categorise that. The fun and funky stuff is kind of creative and doing the invoicing thing can somewhat be creative, but you can make into these lists where you have the tasks that are draining, and then you can have the tasks that are creative and that lets you sort of think out of the box. And all the tasks in your mind are being accomplished at the same time. But some are continuously being accomplished and some are not. Your mind is fantastic at multi-tasking and you've just got to continue to remember that. When you have these tasks, they're in your mind and you've actually created some solidity by putting them down on paper, is when the magic starts to happen.

The Final Word

A dream wrote down with a date becomes a goal. A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan, and a plan backed by action makes your dreams come through. Think about that, and start writing your lists.

Business Insurance 101

Oh no. We're going to talk about that nasty thing no one likes to pay, but everyone has to have: Insurance. You have to have it for your cars, your house and also your business. So what sort of business insurance are important? What should you have and what shouldn't you have? What is over the top and what is not? Now, it obviously all depends on the type of business that you're running. We deal with a lot of industries, and for us, we have a lot of different types of insurance.

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Professional Indemnity

The obvious one here, professional indemnity. You need to have that. That's an important one. The amount that you'd need is all dependent upon, again, your industry, but normally talking like $10, $20 or $30 million or something like that, or higher. Again, it just depends on who you're dealing with.

Key Person

If you're a small business, an insurance that I think is absolutely invaluable is key person insurance. If you're a very small business and I’m talking like a one person businesses, and you bring on an extra staff member. They start doing the voodoo that you're doing and you're starting to grow your business and everything's starting to look really, really good. You go, "Okay, how am I going to do this?" And they start learning everything. You're teaching them everything. You start sticking back, changing the roles that you're doing because then are doing the things that you are doing. You need to sort of work out what happens if they leave if get hit by a bus or something worse. A key person insurance is really important with a small scale business or any business where you know that if someone left, it's going to be an incredibly hard task for you to take on their work again. Think about this: If you've got a key person in your business and they were to disappear, how long would it take you to train up that new person and how much downtime would that cost? That insurance is very, very good.

Service Level Agreements

There's other insurances that you should be looking at such as uptime continuity, insurance and equipment insurance and things like that so that if there is downtime in your business, you have some way to rely on that. However, sometimes it's not all about the insurance. If you have service level agreements, or what's called an SLA, set up with any of your suppliers that are supplying mission critical infrastructure, then you might be okay. Telstra and other big companies, for some of their business-based Internet plans, offer these SLAs to make sure that you're able to have a guaranteed uptime. This goes not just for service level providers such as Telstra, but also a lot of cloud providers. So applications such as Zero and whatnot.

Make Sure You’re Using The Products You Need

What it comes down to is making sure you're using the products that you need. If you're running an online business and you are heavily relying upon your website, you need to make sure you're going with a fantastic host, which has something what's called the five nines or better. That means it's up for 99.999% of the time. If you get the four nines or something like that, it's still quite good, but you just have more of a chance for it to go down. If it's just 99% of the time, that means one in every hundred days it can be down. It doesn't sound very good all of a sudden. So you want to make sure that at the top, top point of all of the primary elements of your business, there is zero to little, very, very little downtime. High level agreements where the service level agreements are giving you what you need. The best way to work out to make sure you don't over insure yourself is thinking about the potential of downtime, how much the insurance is costing and how much it would cost if your business didn't have that facility.

What We Have

For us, we've got all sorts of different insurances. Any of our server's infrastructure in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, any of the infrastructure that we have, if there was to be a flood, fire, theft or some sort of big, catastrophic event we've got insurances to make sure that from the moment. Whatever our income was at that stage, as it builds back up, we were able to know that we'll being subsidised with the difference from the insurance company until we're able to bring our clients back.

The Final Word

There's all sorts of insurances for all sorts of things, and it honestly comes down to what it's worth for you. If you're running a mum and dad shop from your garage and if your website goes down it doesn't matter a whole bunch. If this is the case then yeah, you probably don't want to get website insurance or anything like that. But at the same time, if you're in a position where you had $10,000 every two hours or every hour going through your website and there is no storefront and that is everything and your expense is $8,000 over the same time period, you then have to start wondering, "Well, it's probably worthwhile getting a decent level of insurance for that peace of mind, if anything else." Stay good!

So, you want to start a business? There are a few keys things that you have to do which apply to all businesses in Australia.

Get An ABN

Obviously, there are all sorts of different structures that you can go for, but at its most basic elements, you need to be registered with the government to be able to start your own business. Make sure you get yourself an ABN number.

Learn More

You can jump online onto the taxation website and get an ABN number in about 40 minutes once you know what you're doing, which I sincerely suggest you do. They also give you lots of pamphlets, flyers, and printouts that they'll send across to you for you. I recommend sitting down with a beer and reading through them to get more information on exactly what it is that you're paying with GST, what your commitments are when it comes down to your BAS amongst other things.

What are you going to name your business?

If you have a bunch of ideas going through your head I would suggest going to a domain register. Look up domain names that are nice, short, and sweet. For instance, our business name Dorks Delivered. We've got the domain name Dorks. You want your business name to be easy to remember.

Register a Business Name and GST

Once you got ABN, make sure that you get a business name registered. Again, a similar process, jump online, and you can get it done. Once you've got that, you're then able to start trading. If you think you're going to be turning over more than about 80 grand (not profit, but actual turnover) you need to be registered for GST. Once you're registered for GST, you then have to be submitting your BAS every quarter.

Ask Yourself: Why Are You in Business?

What is your product and how are you going to test that? I see businesses all the time start up and fail because they don't think about where they want to be in the future and how the vehicle, being their business, is going to take them there. More recently, there was a business that started up and I advised them to ask themselves where will they find their audience? It was a bricks and mortar style business and they didn't have a lot of capital to set it up. What they did was instead of taking my advice of getting an audience so that when you invest in bricks and mortar, you're able to have people come in and know about you already, they spent all the money on a building lease and fit out. They wanted 50 people minimum a week coming into the store but they had about 16.

Where Will Clients Come From?

How are you going to find clients? I would strongly suggest as one of your first investment choices towards your business to create a website and a Facebook page, and start inviting people into these different sources and ask them, "Do you want this?" Maybe you've found a great way to do something a little differently. If you've done that, you need to see how many people are going to be interested in this product.

Make a Business Plan

Creating a business plan is super important. You can do different things such as a SWOT analysis, but look into agile development. It's all about creating the smallest, most basic item that is scalable that you can then have sent off to your clients or sent out to market. If you use agile development, once you've created that small product, you can then build it into a bigger product. A great example of this is Uber. Uber wanted to make autonomous vehicles, but they couldn't just make autonomous vehicles with the amount of money it was going to cost. Instead what they did is they created an app that allowed for a global community to drive, which allowed for them to take a little bit of money from everyone so they can then create autonomous vehicles.

Managing Your Business and Furthering Product Development

Have an easy-to-follow structure in place. When you've got a product that you know is going to work, then you can start to manage it with other products that allow you to gain visibility into what your customers are interested in. Once you have more insights into the way customers they are using your product, that's when you can really develop your products. but you need to have a system to be able to manage all those clients. I hope this has been useful!

Onboarding staff. Some people cringe, and some people love it. No one should really love staff turnover and onboarding staff. It's normally a hellish process. The reason you have the three-month trial probation is that you need to train them up in that three months, and then if you don't, you're kind of stuck with them, and it's a terrible feeling. What we're going to be talking about today is making your onboarding processes is more refined so that it isn't a task that you won't hate doing.

Before You Begin the Process

Straight from the get-go, I do a certain process to find someone on SEEK. We do some very tricky things on SEEK to try and find people. What we do in our industry, it's very important to have a high level of attention to detail, and you want to make sure that the people that you're getting are fully reading the SEEK post. How we make this happen is by writing a page or page and a half long job post. We make sure it's excessive. Throughout the post, we write just once or twice, "If you do not email through to," the email address that we use, so employment@yourcompanyname or whatever it is, "Do not email through to this address, you will not be considered for the job." This is important to do in order to whittle down your applicants. A lot of people just apply to 100 jobs and think someone will say yes. If they're not going to go to the trouble to actually contact you, you shouldn't be going to the trouble to read through what ends up being literally hundreds of emails.

The Next Step

You've now got a bunch of people that have emailed through to you. You can use different tools such as Zapier and other integration tools that let you send an email back to them. We send out a few basic questions, such as, "Do you have your driver's licence? How long have you been in XYZ industry? What would you say is your primary, secondary, and tertiary interests in working with us?" By doing this you then get all this great data that you can then export into Excel, Google Sheets or whatever it is that you're using to be able to look at which candidates you find most appropriate. The onboarding process for a new staff member hasn't even properly started yet, but it has already become well more refined in only a few hours of work.

Documentation is High Priority

Documentation, documentation, documentation. It's so important. Whoever's in current job roles, and I mean everyone in your company, needs to start writing down the processes of what they do on their day-to-day. It can be anything from replacing the coffee filters to offboarding old hardware, or an old client, or any sort of thing. Anything and everything should be documented. Absolutely everything. We started doing this process, and within six months, we had more than 150 knowledge base articles on how to do things throughout our business. It builds quickly, and it is an expensive process if you're doing it properly.

Time to Onboard

Once you've got all that down pat, the onboarding becomes really easy. You look at the tasks that they need to focus on mostly, and you look at the different systems that they need to have logins into. If your IT company's half-decent, they will be able to integrate all of the different logins and passwords that you use into a single portal. This means there will be one password for everyone to remember, and that also means that there's one place for everything to be deactivated. That is just as important. You want to make offboarding as easy as onboarding too. No one wants to spend their day going through 670 password changes over a 12-hour period with three staff members to change everything to make sure they no longer have access. Integrate all your systems together so that you can click the on and the off button very quickly and easily. It makes your whole setup more secure.

First Steps

The onboarding process is a two-person step. You have one person that's going to be setting up all the different accounts and the procedures. That's the internal onboarding process for that new staff member. You then have the tasks that that new staff member needs to do once they've been onboarded. Maybe it's learning the different systems, learning the different utilities and tools, or learning where the bathroom is. Any of these things can be documented and they can view them if they have access to a portal. Your IT company should be able to jump in and help you set up so that you are on top of it.

Use the Documentation to Your Advantage

Everything becomes more straightforward with great documentation. The best bit about using a great-quality documentation setup is the value of your business goes through the roof. You have something tangible where you can show, "This is how this works." It means you can have key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow you to measure what people are doing and what people aren't. If they're not abiding by the exact instructions and processes that you've described, and they're going off the rails and doing it in a different way, you can easily issue a warning. You have the procedural documentation there that they're able to follow and make sure they're doing the right things. If you need more IT support to be able to do something like this, call out to them. See what they say. You shouldn't be spending all your time doing this. You need to have processes in place so it's nice and quick.

The Final Word

Your time as a business owner is valuable. I think it is the most valuable in the company. People are looking up to you, and you need to have time available to them. If you're too busy doing other stuff, you will not be focusing on the right things. Being able to document everything, even if the onboarding at the early stages is taking a little bit longer, means that it's a task that you don't have to do in the future. Document, script, automate, integrate. That's what you need to remember to do, and that is what's going to push you above and beyond your competitors and have you have a tangible, saleable asset when it comes down to selling your business. Stay good!