Thinking Home Business Working from home in a networked world

Good service or good product - which would you choose?

I imagine that most people, asked whether they would prefer to have good service or a good product, would be inclined to say “both”.

And of course if you are in a professional services business, as I am, you can’t really separate the two.

But this sign I saw at the local weekend market got me thinking about the importance of ensuring the quality of what we provide, as distinct from how we provide it.

Farmers at the market

In case you are wondering, the farming people selling their own produce at this stall are quite friendly. They don’t actually provide bad service: the sign is what my mother, who came from the country, used to call “bush humor”.

And you will be able to have a much more informative and lengthy conversation with them about what you are buying - and they will give you the time to do so - than you will get with the checkout person at the local supermarket. In fact, if you have the time, you will almost certainly be able to learn from them a lot about what they are growing, what’s in season and isn’t (try and get that information at the supermarket!), what effect current climate conditions are having on various crops.  Yes, some people will wait a bit longer to get served, but everyone will get served in due course, and anyway it’s Sunday, so what’s the rush?

You can probably be confident that the farmers are more likely to say “G’day” than “How are you today?” and they almost certainly won’t say “Have a nice day” (with or without a cheesy smile) when you are leaving.

What I can be absolutely sure of is that at the first bite of their produce I will feel very grateful to have fruit and vegetables of such quality and freshness.

And I love buying from the burly farmer who hands over his beautiful, fresh spinach so gently, carefully, as you would something produced with love and tells you proudly he just managed to get it picked last night before the big rain hit.

So what I get at my local market and for which I don’t actually need the niceties of “retail service” is quality produce, planted, nurtured and harvested lovingly by people who take pride in what they do and get pleasure out of seeing that I recognize the quality of it.

The fact that it actually costs less than what look like comparable products (except they’ve come from the cool room after a lengthy journey in trucks and via other cool rooms and have lost most of their taste somewhere along the way) is a bonus. What I want and relish is the quality and (don’t tell the farmers) I would surely pay a bit more if they asked.

Professional services business

So when I apply these considerations to my professional services business - coaching and consulting - what sort of distinctions can I make? Can I really make a distinction between product and service? Isn’t it all of what I do, what others in professional services do, about service?

Well yes. But within the concept of professional service I would make a major distinction between what I would call the outward trappings of service and how I engage with the people and companies I’m privileged to serve, in the deeper sense of really working to understand their needs and using my knowledge and skills to deliver the best quality of listening, guiding, supporting or problem-solving I can.

The world of farming and the worlds of coaching, consulting and other professional services are in fact not so far removed from one another as might be supposed.

While writing this post I remembered, years ago, being “all ears” at a lecture in the Sydney Opera House by the legendary Dr Stephen Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, when he spoke about - among other things - the values of the farm and how, just as the farm works on immutable natural laws, so do human relationships. Including, clearly, the human relationships involved in delivering professinal services.

His argument can be found in the first chapter of 7 Habits (excerpt here), where he makes the distinction between what he calls the Character Ethic and the Personality Ethic, arguing (my paraphrase) that a lot of what is done in business now owes more to techniques (of persuasion, of presentation, and so on), as in the Personality Ethic, than to the deeper values summed up in the concept of the Character Ethic.

When it’s mainly technique, quality suffers, if not now, then in the long run.

The glitter of the Personality Ethic, the massive appeal, is that there is some quick and easy way to achieve quality of life — personal effectiveness and rich, deep relationships with other people — without going through the natural process of work and growth that makes it possible.

He presents what for is me a powerful argument for the cultivation of those qualities of character, in ourselves, in the culture of our businesses, that make us and our companies desirable and reliable to do business with in the long term.

He calls for respect for and engagement with “the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based”".

High-trust culture. That’s the basis on which, as much as possible, I want to do business, both with those from whom I purchase goods and services and with those who give me the privilege of providing them with professional services.

I want to have a justifiable pride in the service I deliver, like the farmer who hands over his just-picked spinach, planted by him, grown with his own hands, preferably pesticide-free, harvested by him. And if I am as is sometimes the case being an agent for someone else’s products or services I want to have that confidence in them and the quality of what they offer.

Business as high-trust culture. Not just “service”.

That’s how I see it. Does that make sense to you? Have I missed something?

The online application Wordle has been available for quite a while now, but until today I had not thought of a way I could make use of it, other than for its entertainment/distraction value.

Then I read a post by my friend Noric Dilanchian, a detailed “how to” on preparing proposals and reviews. Noric is very creative in using images to complement the words in his posts. In the particular post about proposals (which by the way is well worth reading and bookmarking for future reference), Noric had used an image generated by the online application Wordle.

That was a lightbulb moment for me: I realized that Wordle would be a very useful resource for blog posting.

I sometimes spend quite a lot of time looking for an image that will go with a particular post and whose use is not restricted by copyright. Which basically means either using my own photography or an image which has a Creative Commons licence. So if I don’t have a suitable pic of my own I go trawling through flickr, with the Advanced Search option turned on and the Creative Commons box checked, or through stock.xchange or use Zemanta, which basically does the search for me on flickr (Zemanta finds other content too). Sorting and choosing can take time.

The lightbulb moment was that with Wordle I now had another, quite speedy way to acquire an image which is covered by a Creative Commons licence. It’s literally as simple as dropping some text into a text box and pressing a button. Or you can enter the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed, or enter a del.icio.us tag.

I tested the Wordle system, first by copying and pasting in the text of a blog post from yesterday on Des Walsh dot Com. The post focuses on social media expert Shel Israel, currently visiting China, and makes reference to statistics about bloggers in China.

The picture demonstrates how the software gives more prominence, through gradations of font size, to the words and phrases that occur more frequently in the blog post.

I tested also the way Wordle outputs an image based on the tags from a del.icio.us username, in this case with my coachdes account at del.icio.us Would you guess from the image below that I tend to do more tagging on the terms socialmedia, blogging, blogworld08 and, a bit less, SocialNetworking and Twitter, than on some others?

At first you might have to play around a bit with Wordle to get the hang of it. But it’s not complex and there is a detailed FAQ section as well as a forum.

You can also do a lot of manipulation of the image in terms of language, font, layout and color.

It is a condition of using the images that you provide a link to the Wordle site. One way to do that is to use the HTML code provided when you create an image. I had a problem with that and it may help someone if I share what that was and how I solved it.

The problem was that the image generated by the code provided was too small to be useful for the blog post. I could have put image size tags in the HTML but did not know the relativities of height and width and did not want to waste time experimenting, if there was a better way. To illustrate, the code for the image above made from the del.icio.us is:

<a href="http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/309690/Des_Walsh%27s_del.icio.us_tags"
title="Wordle: Des Walsh&#39;s del.icio.us tags"><img
src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/309690/Des_Walsh%27s_del.icio.us_tags"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>

When I embedded that in the code for this page I gott this:

That would have been ok if I had only wanted a small image, but I wanted a larger one.

The solution was staring me in the face on the page where I had created the image, but in fact I found the answer on the FAQ page, where it was pointed out that I could do a screenshot and save the image in that way. Note: that meant that for publication, as in a blog post, I had to take the extra step of including a link to the Wordle site at http://wordle.net - if you just use the supplied html code the link to the Wordle site is already included.

The image at the beginning of this post was made when I had completed most of the text, using some of the keywords from the text, then doing a screenshot of the image generated by Wordle, saving, adjusting and uploading it. Kind of a pictorial summary of what follows in the text.

There are several screen image capture applications. I use Gadwin PrintScreen, which is free to download, then save the image to Irfanview, also a free download, adjust the size to what I want, save as a jpg (jpeg) file and upload it to the blog site.

I hope you find this post helpful. If you do use Wordle to create an image for a blog post, please feel free to leave a comment here with a link to the post.

I’ve been meaning to write an extended version of a suggestion I made during one of the sessions at BlogWorld Expo 08, about a way to make posting to your blog a stress-free exercise. It seemed to strike a chord with a few people.

The basic idea was to think of blogging as you would think of chatting with a friend over a coffee.

Then think of a phrase you would use naturally, to start a sentence in that conversation.

I gave a couple of examples at the BlogWorld Expo session and this morning I’ve jotted down some more. I stopped at twelve.

• I was thinking the other day how…
• Have you heard about that woman/man who …
• I was walking down the street, minding my own business, when…
• I saw something quite amazing/amusing/curious/weird/funny yesterday…
• I was chatting this morning with my friend about…
• Sometimes I can’t believe how…
• You’ll never guess …
• Isn’t it funny how sometimes you can meet someone you’ve known for a long time ……
• A long, long time ago…
• I met this really interesting woman/man who ….
• You know how there are some days when you think, maybe I should have just stayed in bed?
• I’ve been meaning to… (as you may have noticed, the one I used to start this post)

Why not try it?

If the idea appeals to you, but the particular examples don’t work for you, I’m sure you can come up with some more and better. I think you’ll find it fun - well, I did. And I hope you will share. So please leave your suggestions in the comments here.

Photo “two women talking over coffee” by ellenantill, via flickr, Creative Commons

Last week I had some people disagreeing with or at least questioning the underlying argument of my post on the “myth of isolation”, one of a series on working from home and loving it.

In response to one of those comments, I explained that I had been using “myth” not in the sense in which it is often used these days, that is of a fable, or a story that is simply untrue, but rather in the sense (from MS Encarta no less) of “a narrative that through many retellings has become an accepted tradition in a society”.

But while I am happy sticking to my guns about the myth of isolation, I know too that I have been putting off writing this next post in the series, on the myth of financial insecurity.

The little voice in my ear was saying “How can you seriously claim that, for people working from home, financial insecurity is a ‘myth’? Surely if you have your own business from home you are going to have less financial security than your next door neighbor who heads off each day to her well-paid job, with health and other benefits, in a major corporation.”

No doubt.

But we know that that picture can change. And is changing for many, at a much faster rate than any of us can afford to be complacent about.

The trouble is, we humans often take time to adjust to changes in our circumstances. When we apply that to the job market, we know that in some economies in relatively recent history there used to be what amounted to being “jobs for life“. As long as you showed up each day, kept your head down and did your job, you could expect to be there till it came time to retire. It can be hard to get over that mental conditioning.

So let me be very clear here. I’m not saying there is no financial insecurity involved in having a home based business. There is financial insecurity in any business.

I am saying that the level of financial insecurity inherent in having a home based business needs to be put in perspective and weighed against the financial insecurity - in the contemporary economic climate - of what used to be called “a steady job”.

Yes, part of us might still be yearning for the return of those “good old days”. But our conscious mind knows that, right now, you don’t have to look far, whether in mainstream media or online, to see that whatever field you are in that idea of a job for life is as dead as the dodo.

Under the heading Huge job losses signal a shrinking economy, the Christian Science Monitor Global Credit Crisis Blog this weekend spelled out some of what the deepening recession means in terms of the US job market:

The latest evidence of the intensifying economic storm came on Friday when the Labor Department reported that the economy shed 240,000 jobs in October, the second worst month of the year – after a revised loss of 284,000 jobs in September. The nation’s unemployment rate looked even more dire, skyrocketing to 6.5 percent in October, up from 6.1 percent in September and the highest level since February 1994.

It’s worldwide. For example, as the BBC reported last week - China job losses prompt exodus - tens of thousands of migrant workers are crowding the rail system as they leave the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou after losing their jobs.

And it’s not just jobs that have gone or are at risk. Home ownership, life savings and investments have been either put at great risk or even swept away in the tsunami of the global credit crisis.

No doubt, in certain industries and with certain skill sets, some people can estimate that, on the balance of probabilities, they will be safe in their jobs for the foreseeable future and as a corollary will be able to meet mortgage payments and other expenses without undue stress. For many others, the future must look somewhat cloudy at best.

It’s in relation to that broader economic environment and in the sense of “relative to the financial security of a regular job in an office or factory” that I refer to the “myth of financial insecurity” in working from home.

And, given the times, given the headlines, might it not be a kind of insurance to test one’s aptitude for business by establishing some form of part-time business from home while still having a “regular” job?

Developing a business from home in this way, however modestly, can help us develop our business skills and make us more self-reliant, less dependent for our long-term livelihood on the goodwill of others, such as employers, less dependent on the concept, now regarded in some circles as - at best - quaint, of company loyalty to staff. If down the track you really want or need to have a full time business from home you will have better skills than if you had to start cold. You will also have the benefit of starting to learn an essential mindset or skill for long-term business success, that of thinking like a business owner, not like an employee.

For anyone is attracted to the idea of working from home but troubled by the financial risk aspect of having a home based business, I recommend reading Tim Ferriss’ book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. Even if you don’t want to follow everything he suggests, the book is a marvellous challenge to a number of commonly held views and attitudes which may not serve us well in terms of the future of workand business.

And on the flip side of the financial security issue, there can be some quantifiable financial benefits in having your own business, working from home. For example, considering the Benjamin Franklin principle, “a penny saved is a penny earned”, think of how much more money you can earn by:

• no gasoline or bus or train fare needed for the 30 second commute to your home office/desk
• getting lunch from the fridge, not the local diner (tip: we regularly cook more for dinner so we can heat some up for lunch the next day)
• not having to put in for special occasion presents for staff members (including the ones you have hardly met and may not even like)
• not going for drinks after work (plus the added benefit of not saying things you may later regret!)
• serious reduction in the need for an elaborate work wardrobe
• tax benefits (don’t guess about these or rely on web research - consult your accountant, please!)

I know that as a long-term home business owner, a lifer so to speak, I am biased. Whether you agree or disagree with my views, I hope you will take the opportunity to share with us in the comments your point of view, your story, your tips on the issue of financial security/insecurity in having a home based business.

In the next post on this series I’ll be looking at some of the pleasures of working from home.