Bad Entrepreneur

I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to publish this rant, but after seeing that “Ricky Gervais quits ‘pointless’ Twitter” is considered news for the Mail & Guardian I’m going to go hell for leather.

Yesterday one of South Africa’s more high profile social bloggers posted a rant slamming Sandwich Baron for failing to deliver her sandwich on time. “I’ve tweeted three times, DM’ed them and called them once” she writes on her blog. FFS (!) you don’t Tweet somebody after they’ve failed to deliver – you unleash absolute hellfire and brimstone on the first hapless person who picks up the phone and you repeat process until you get somebody senior enough to make your problem go away.

Since the start of the year I’ve come across six “social media experts / gurus” between the ages of 21 and 24 who have given me the story about how they could revolutionise a business using their knowledge of technology. For crying in a bucket you don’t look like you would be comfortable talking to a real living, breathing woman and yet you want to tell me about SOCIAL media?!

I’m sure there are many other social media experts in South Africa with the right credentials but I know of only one person who I would trust to run a “social media” campaign and that’s Melissa Attree.

Melissa has worked in an agency with real people, real clients and seen PR / marketing / media relations / communications from various different angles.  In your early 20’s you have not done that so go and get yourself a little experience and some contacts and a portfolio and then take it from there.

Don’t get me wrong – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare,blogging etc – they’re all great tools and many have the capacity to be very handy business tools. They’re a big part of my business. But unless you are out there meeting real people and constantly talking to the industry in which you operate, how are you possibly going to understand what the major problems are?

I was reading a post the other day from one of these young guys and he was berating the way that companies “expect” employees to work from 9-5 when technology empowers them to be far more productive in that time. My response was that I’m in the process of looking for somebody for our business to fulfil a sales and marketing type role. I can tell you now that I’m probably not going to rush to give that person a PC with access to the internet… and I run an internet publishing business.

I would far rather that person be out meeting industry people with a higher profile and talking about some of the things we are doing and letting THEM build the social media hype around it.

If you are not comfortable with people, then force yourself to go out and interact with them. If necessary go extreme and go to a strip club and let the dancers hit on you all night and when you can finally walk away having had a conversation with them without emptying your wallet then you know you’re probably equipped to start talking about social media.

Said it before and I will say it again – one of the biggest mistakes I made when I started out in my small business is that I tried to conduct my business from behind a computer screen. I convinced myself I was “networking” or “building our profile”. The single biggest project we ever got came because my wife and her assistant bought tickets to go to listen to some speaker at a health conference. Over the tea and biscuits they were having at the interval she got chatting to one of the organisers and 24 hours later she was asked to put together a proposal that would prove to keep us in business for six months.

Makes you think doesn’t it….

… so endeth this rant.

The title of this blog is “The blog for the less than perfect entrepreneur” and the intention behind it was to highlight mistakes I made so that hopefully other entrepreneurs (and I) could learn from them.

The all-fall-down at Bundublog.com has to rate up there as a pretty sizeable mistake and it will take me and the company a while to live it down reputationally and financially.

It did however highlight again how important systems are for a small to medium sized enterprise and I bring it up because a lot of small businesses only worry about systems when they discover they are no longer there… ala me! 

When I was growing up and I first joined the family business, my dad would drum into me the importance of using the in-house contact management / CRM system. At the time I would see it as a chore and I never quite appreciated what its importance was.

It was drummed into me:

• Capture every business card as you get it
• Capture every business lead / enquiry as you get it
• Link every quote, e-mail or telephone conversation to the clients entry

Its value only became apparent a few years later when we were forced to take two big corporates to court after breach of contract. We impressed the judge sufficiently with our methodical record keeping that we won the cases and the damages. In contrast the corporates had maintained little if any internal records.

The same kind of things could be applied to tax where many businesses suffer unnecessary fines simply because they were unable to manage their systems. (Very familiar!)

Sales is another example – they are the lifeblood of an SME. Yet how many small businesses zero in on managing each and every lead and mining where it has come from?

Marketing - can you actually quantify what marketing is working for you?!

Administration – we all hate paperwork but if you don’t at least have some kind of system in place you are going to get burnt somewhere along the line.

Backups – this experience losing 90% of one of my business assets – Bundublog.com - says it all.