It has been a very chic business concept for companies to release their employees from the supposed chains of their offices.  Work from home, work from the road, work from the top of a mountain – technology makes it irrelevant.  I am not so sure.  Rather than calling this movement the creation of an “Office 2.0,” office brain drain is a more apt description for remote work because the intellectual capital of your business is scattered.  With any venture, the whole is far greater than the sum of the individual scattered parts.  I am skeptical of a complete shift away from the physical office for three reasons:

1. Office Culture

Tools like Skype, remote conferencing, video calls, and even our smartphones have made the notion of commuting to a physical office seem less and less necessary.  However, I think businesses are starting to observe the fallout from this type of thinking.  The biggest move away from the trend in “remote commuting” was Marissa Myer, CEO of Yahoo!, banning remote work and calling her employees back to the office.  Her view is that many of the best ideas come when employees meet in corridors, share lunch, or get together for an impromptu brainstorming meeting.  She also claims that workers are less productive at home, where there are numerous other distractions, though this is hard to measure.

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side… We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” –Melissa Myer

Intuitively, Mrs. Myer’s argument makes sense and real human-to-human interaction is hard to mimic. At StartupNation, much of our team is remote and we have all wondered out loud whether this is the best path to continue down for the rest of 2013.  Imagine the difference in pitching a startup to a VC: “Our rockstar team will be scheming together in our office, building this company” versus “Our rockstar team is scattered around the world, but we will only be an email or phone call away from one another.”  Having your own desk and your own office phone as part of a larger business organism are office details that are here to stay.

2. Time Management

When you work remotely, when does your workday start and end?  You may wake up early, work, then exercise, work some more, get lunch with friends, pick up your kids from school, add a little more work, dinner, work, bed – or some variation on that theme.  While flexibility is touted as the most valuable benefit of remote work, I know many people who see it as a curse.  Without some tangible demarcation between work time and personal time, they lose the ability to truly relax because, in a sense, they are always at their “office.”  Add the fact that your cell phone is your work phone and now you’re chained to your job.  A return to the office means workers can give out an office phone number, rather than their personal cell number, and keep work at work.  It also means that when you are at work, you focus on work and when you’re not you don’t.  Often, this means greater focus resulting in higher productivity in both your personal and professional lives.

3. Go Local

A huge upside of remote work is opening up the availability in a company’s recruiting talent pool.  Instead of looking in just your local area, you can essentially recruit from anywhere.  So while this benefit is hard to ignore and businesses with different branch locations will always have employees across geographies, fostering the personal connection is getting easier.  A great article in The Atlantic reminds us that, despite our feelings to the contrary, airline prices have been dropping all along.  Despite all this, though, going local is a popular theme these days both in what vegetables you buy and who you hire.  Cheap airline tickets will never fully supplement the benefits of having your key employees within arms reach.  Expect to see a swing back towards home-grown talent.

Does this mean that we have to return to the cubicle culture?  Absolutely not.  Open office layouts, casual dress codes, areas to relax and socialize and even grab a game of ping-pong are all positives.  However, what is the point of having a swanky office if there is no one there to populate it?

1.  The essence of an API is that it makes it easy for two types of programs to talk to each other.

2.  So when you are selecting an email marketing vendor or an accounting vendor, you want to ask them if they have an API.

3.  Next, you should consider if there are already integrations in place.  If there are, then you don’t even need an API.  For example, if your email provider is already integrated with Salesforce.com, a popular CRM application, then you know the two applications can talk to each other automatically without you having to hire a coder to make them talk to each other.

4.  Now, if any application does not have an API, then consider that it will be significantly harder to get it to talk to other applications.  Just keep that in mind then you are in decision-making mode.

As examples, many vendors have free APIs already available to anyone.  For example, Twitter and Facebook have a variety of APIs that allow you to push your content directly to the social media platforms or let your users log in to your website directly with their Facebook or Twitter information.  Many of your key solutions also integrate with your website.  For example, your email marketing platform will communicate with your website and automatically update your mailing list when new users register.  This automated approach saves you time and eliminates error.

Overall, APIs simplify your business processes by making your solutions work together seamlessly.  They are easy to integrate so all you need to do is take advantage of their benefits!

Here’s what David had to say…

What do you do at gotoBilling.com and how long have you been with the company?

I’ve been with the company for three years now. My official title is Director of Operations, but I do a little bit of everything. 

One of our big projects is building a new style of support modeled after another company that did wonders with the concept. It’s how our support staff will not only handle customer support and training, but will also handle the sales.

That way, when we work with customers, they never have to deal with different departments and different people from their initial call to ongoing support.

To accomplish this, I help with training, operations, and the workflow from our CRM system and how the rest of our internal systems tie together.

The concept is that from the beginning when someone calls, there’s one person that handles all the customer interaction so the customer always feels a strong connection to who’s helping them and that person never gets lost in the shuffle from one department to the next. 

I also work a fair amount on SEO on our Web site and do a little sales as well. Then, there’s also helping with the design and testing of new features as that falls into my Operations category of responsibilities.

Operations is always a broad category which I like as it really allows me to help with the overall working operations of an entire company so we are all moving in the right direction and in step with each other and each department.  

gotoBilling.com experienced a 307% volume increase during the recession. What is your secret to success?

Well, I think there are a couple of things. Number one is that every business still needs the ability to handle their payments and do it cost effectively.

Our system is much easier to use than other systems so it saves people valuable time, helps speed up their collection of funds, and since we handle multiple forms of payment many different ways for a business, then we have a real impact on helping a business streamline some of their processes. 

I think that is what has allowed us to continue growing during this downturn in the economy compared to many other companies. Also, and maybe most importantly, we didn’t make any budget cuts in marketing our services.

What do you do differently than other, similar businesses that are currently struggling due to the recession?

We kept on marketing and didn’t cut the budget. In fact, we increased our marketing and sales budget as that is the life-blood of a company. From what I hear, that might also have been a big factor in what we did compared to other businesses.

What can other e-commerce businesses do now to be more successful during these tough economic times?

Don’t stop marketing! 

To me, that’s the main thing to do. Now that the economy is tough, your competitors are cutting back on marketing and sales so it’s prime time to increase yours and grab the business. 

It’s sort of like buying property when the price is down. There are less people bidding to buy so it’s a better market. It’s the same thing when selling a product. There might be less businesses buying, but if your competitors have cut back their advertising, yours will stand out more for the ones that are still buying.�
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For more great tips from David and how his company is thriving during these tough times, check back on Thursday.

In the meantime, please feel free to send me your comments and PR questions here or at www.rembrandtwrites.com.

Click on this image to start the video:

This was from the TED technology track, but there are other tracks that speak to where we’re headed as well.

What an exciting world we live in, and what incredible capabilities we have as individuals and collaborators.

1. Why will people pay you? (money, votes, donations)
2. What does it cost you to sell your item…margins?
3. What protects you from competition, price-feature battles?
4. How will you turn an agnostic audience into loyal customers?

Early on when transactions had no costs, doing anything at a huge scale was very cheap. In order to be successful (a subjective term), you didn’t have to be very big at all. Some efforts don’t look at revenue as the only sign of success, and it’s probably safe to assume they have no real business model.

Identifying tribes and determining the success of working with them is not a new idea; the concept of tribe mentality or acting in a way that benefits the tribe has been around since cavemen. But, the concept of bringing people together, of building tribes, makes the internet is the best friend of people focusing on the third component, differentiating yourself from the competition. Once a network is in place, it is extremely difficult for someone else to disrupt it. I’ll add to this that the network must be active, relevant and provide value. 

The internet, it’s “isms” and even some of our online behaviors are permeating our culture. It is affecting business models offline as well. Local t-shirt and records stores, traditional advertising firms, and political campaign have different business model than they did ten years ago—can you imagine Dukakis, Stockton, Bush Snr, or Dan Quayle, figuring out what tweeting means?

Viral marketing and the growth of cash-free marketing means that people can spread an idea farther and faster than ever before. It also makes it far cheaper for a competitor to enter the market.

Here are three examples of companies leveraging online to create mini movements:

What mini movement is driving your business?

Traditionally, companies that “do good” are generally non profits, and when people find out that a traditional small business is also “doing good” they feel like somehow the company must be taking advantage of the community it is serving if it is also turning a profit. I do not believe this to be the case and formed my consulting company based on the premise that small businesses would contribute to a triple bottom line if they knew where to find it.

Creative Capitalism has been around for a while. Formerly known as social entrepreneurism, it is a concept newly labeled by Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and other market leaders and the premise is that “we should attempt to stretch the reach of market forces so that more companies can benefit from doing work that makes more people better off.” The book is available on Amazon (unsure of where the profits go). So far, it’s a pretty foreign concept to most bottom-line discussions. Having spent time reviewing the giving trends of big tycoons in the past (land trusts, libraries, parks), there is something different about the timing of this idea: the generation that is receiving it.  

The 30 and 20-somethings have grown disillusioned with where the 1980s consumption and 1990s holding on behavior have gotten us. Those that have the means to get out and travel, see the disparity in the world, come back and want to do something about it. With technology to reflect back their experiences they are twittering, facebooking, myspacing and texting what they are seeing to one another – and a small group are doing something about it.

Why profile TOMS?

Two reasons: 1) Anyone who has seen true the true spirit of leadership in play knows it is the eagerness to lose oneself in the group for the good of the group. This quality is best exemplified in Blake Mycoskie for the simple reason: that is where the heart of his business began. One for One, from day One. 2) Any size business should learn that a social model (something that takes into account the community in which it survives) thrives 10-fold compared to businesses that have tunnel-vision on bottom line sales. There is something to be said for karma.

About the Company

TOMS Shoes promises to give to children in need a pair of shoes for each pair it sells. The company  has given over 140,000 pairs of shoes and expects to give more than 300,000 pairs this year.

TOMS Shoes launched in Venice, California and sold 10,000 pairs during the first year in business. As a result, Blake returned to Argentina in October of 2006 with family and friends and unveiled the second phase of his business plan: the Shoe Drop Tour. To meet demand, TOMS now offers Shoe Drop Tours throughout diverse regions of Argentina. These are volunteer opportunities where TOMS Shoes supporters hand-deliver shoes to children. Since its beginning, TOMS has given over 140,000 shoes to children in need around the world. 

Here is a bit of my discussion with Blake:

Why shoes?
BLAKE: Walking is the primary mode of transportation in developing countries. Children walk miles just to get food and water, to make their way to school, or to reach medical help. In some communities, children can’t even attend school unless they have proper footwear. And the leading plague in these countries is soil-transmitted parasites. Shoes are such a simple answer to these problems children face every day.

See TOMS educational videos: One Day Without Shoes and Why Ethiopia (warning on the second video for graphic images)

Technology is required in today’s job market. Is TOMS Shoes looking to attract a blended workforce, or does the average age of the workers in the company reflect a standard .com?
BLAKE: For the first few years, our staff reflected the young, evolving company that we were. But as we grow, TOMS is definitely looking to attract a diverse workforce. We’ve become much more aware of our needs, and therefore able to hire individuals with specific skill sets, relevant experience, and worthy knowledge. I am still the CEO and Chief Shoe Giver, and I continue to immerse myself in TOMS because it’s my passion. I have creative ideas and feverish curiosity, and my team is receptive to that. But I definitely have trust in those who are facilitating the every day, drafting direction, and establishing strategies.

Your company is for-profit. What sort of profit sharing model exists for the employees and how did you arrive at the decision to not do a nonprofit?
BLAKE: My earnings from other businesses I had started before TOMS are what kept us afloat in the earlier days- TOMS was not funded by an outside 3rd party. I never had to present a business plan or get approval, I just had trust in myself and the One for One concept. Of course people laughed when I said TOMS would give a pair of shoes away for every pair we sold, but now TOMS is proving One for One as a viable business model. Our customers have been amazing supporters since day 1.

I created TOMS as a for-profit business to ensure a sustainable way of giving. We’re able to give shoes weekly in Ethiopia, and monthly in Argentina. I also wanted to prove that you can build giving into your business model from day one and still be profitable. We get a lot of inquiries from all types of organizations wanting to get involved with TOMS in one way or another. It’s a blessing, really, but we have to be careful in these first critical years of building our brand.

You are an example of an individual whose actions will help define the generation they are in. Your generation is described as both the “me generation” and the “giving generation.” How do you think your generation should be characterized?
BLAKE: This generation is one that thrives off of action. We don’t dream about change, we make it happen. We don’t imagine a way to incorporate giving in to our daily lives- we do it. TOMS has so many young supporters who are passionate about the One for One movement, and who share the story and inspire others every day they wear their TOMS. Seeing them support this business model is proof that this generation is ready and able to create a better tomorrow.

People connect with TOMS beyond just owning another pair of shoes. There’s something more every time you slip on a pair, every time you share the story, every time you suggest a pair of TOMS as a gift because no matter what brought you to purchasing a pair of TOMS, you are making an impact on a child’s life. Will there be saturation of cause-based marketing? Most likely, but TOMS has paved the way for other entrepreneurs to incorporate giving in to their businesses.

The One for One mission is sticking with this generation, and causing a new way of thinking. We grew up with parents who were taking those first small steps, and now we are just charging full speed ahead towards a better tomorrow. We have to. One for One is proving that you can bring closure to an issue by incorporating a conscious decision in to the actions you already take- whether its as a consumer purchasing a product, or a business looking for ways to inspire a better tomorrow. It makes consumerism and philanthropy come together full circle.

Carpe Diem!

On Tuesday, we talked to super Mom entrepreneur, Stacy Roderick. Stacy helped create the one-stop resource for paperless invoicing, marketing and electronic billing atGoToBilling, www.gotobilling.com.Today, Stacy shares more of her work-life balance success tips.

What advice do you have for other couples who work together?  

Separation of duties and plenty of communication. Try not to step on each other’s toes. Figure out your strengths and weaknesses and learn out how to maximize your talents between the two of you. Pray a lot for unity because you can’t go home to your spouse and complain about the boss.

How do you stay fit while running a business and a household?  

Push-ups on the counter while waiting for you coffee to brew or water to boil.  Squats while brushing your teeth. Play airplane with your kids – It’s great for your leg strength. Chase the dog around the yard. Chase your kids around the yard.  

We also ski, hike and spend time outdoors as much as we can. I don’t go to the gym—period. I do have a mini trampoline that I use occasionally, a treadmill that you can combine with books on tape, reading, meditation etc. I stay busy and we do a lot of housework. Pushing a vacuum around 4000 sqare feet is a workout in itself. Up and down the stairs helps a lot.

What tips do you have for other Mom-entrepreneurs who want to save time and money in today’s economy? 

Eat at home. Use leftovers to make exciting new meals. Eat healthy—Junk food is expensive and your family will eat less healthy food than they will junk food because of the empty calories. Things that you use a lot of, buy in bulk. I buy frozen organic vegetables at Costco. I can get five lbs of organic corn for the price of two small bags at the grocery store.

Pay attention to what you spend your money on and cut back where you can. We shop clearance sales and thrift store for a lot of things. We take good care of our vehicles so they last us for years after we have paid them off (my expedition has 240K miles on it and it’s been paid off for almost eight years).

Is there anything else you would like to add? 

I thank God everyday for the opportunities, the challenges and the blessings he gives our family. Even though there are hard times and we are ultimately responsible for everything we do, it affords our family a lifestyle that most people only dream of. 

I don’t judge lifestyle in monetary value here, but rather the time we can spend together, the education, opportunity, and world experience we can give our children and just the sheer joy of working and building something together.

There are some really great things we can do in the community and in the world with the resources and talents we have been given. Steve is a very generous giver and loves to see us support various missions and charities. It really helps make this all worthwhile knowing that we are working for something more than just a bigger house, a newer car or a more exotic vacation.

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Thanks for your great insights Stacy! For more information, please contact Stacy at www.gotobilling.com. Or, if you have PR questions or need SEO copywriting help, please leave your comments below or contact me at www.rembrandtwrites.com. Thanks!

If you are a mother pursuing your small business dreams, check out this interview with Stacy Roderick of www.GoToBilling.com.

Stacy manages to take care of her family, cook healthy meals, stay in shape, and help run a successful business all at the same time. Here’s what Stacy had to say:

How did you get started in the world of technology and online invoicing? 

Our team, including my husband Steve, started the business as payment processing ISOs and saw that credit card processing would turn into a commodity.  That turned into the pioneering age of ACH processing of which we were one of the original pilot processing companies with the federal reserve. 

Once broadband  became prevalent, we moved into the on-demand model of the payment world which evolved into  the present day gotoBilling.  At one of our user meetings a couple years ago, we had one of our resellers inquire about a way for clients to send out invoices to their customers and accept the payments directly from the emailed invoices.  Voila!  Invoicing with payments was born.

Tell us about your current responsibilities at GoToBilling.  

I handle:

Customer Service
Tech Support
Vendor Relations
All Admin Duties
Accounting
Billing
Sales Support
QA and Testing
ACH Rules Compliance
State and Federal Compliance
Coffee Supply Officer
Making sure everyone else gets all of their assigned duties completed
HR and employment related issues!

What do you like most about being a business owner? 

Long hours and the flexibility to sleep whichever 4 of the 24 hours in a day I choose. I get to take work with me on my vacations. In seriousness—I love the building process.  I love the customers.  I enjoy making things work and the flexibility to come and go as I please and be with the kids at home (we home school and  we like to be around the kids while they are in “class.” ).

I love to be able to travel with the kids and take them to new countries. And I really like not having to get up at unreasonable hours (before 7 or 8 in the morning for example). 

What are some tips you can share with other busy mothers who are trying to balance work and family? 

Learn to do more than one thing at a time. Teach your children how to clean house and help cook meals. Responsibility is a great thing to instill in children and it’s fun to be with them in the kitchen and around the house.  

Let them spend as much time with you as possible. TURN OFF the TV! Listen to them tell you about their days. If they go to school, drive them rather that throwing them on the bus. Car time is valuable and rewarding.

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For more of Stacy’s great tips on how to work with your signficiant other, stay fit and save time and money, please check back on Thursday. In the meantime, feel free to connect with Stacy at www.gotobilling.com or enter your comments below.

And if you have any public relations or SEO copywriting questions, please let me know here or at www.rembrandtwrites.com. Thanks!

The Small Business Startup Kit was assembled in collaboration with Office Depot, which is supplying all the cool equipment and services included in the Kit. Here’s what in it:

• 1 Toshiba Satellite® U405-S2911 Notebook Computer With Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor
• 1 Fellowes® PS 79ci 100% Jam Proof Cross-Cut Shredder
• 1 Lexmark X 7675 All-In-One Printer/Copier/Scanner/Fax Machine
• 1 $100 Gift Card to use at Office Depot

So, why are we doing this?

For StartupNation, this is all about helping you remove the barriers to starting and growing your business. That’s why we included essentials like the notebook computer, all-in-one printer, and the jam proof shredder. (By the way, trust me - you want to use a shredder. I just visited a transfer station where our garbage is dumped. You could see people’s personal papers flying all around in the wind.)

In any event, with these necessities on hand, the winner will have a well-oiled machine ready to support him or her on a path to success.

Here’s all you have to do for a chance to win this giveaway:

Leave a comment below in this blog as to why you look to retailers like Office Depot for your small business needs.

It’s that simple, folks!

We will then select a comment/answer AT RANDOM and name that person the winner. One comment is allowed per person. Must be 18 years of age or older to participate and based in the U.S. 

We will stop taking comments in this blog post at midnight EASTERN TIME on March 13, 2009. We will announce the winner on March 16, 2009 within this blog entry as a comment with instructions on how the selected winner should contact us with a SHIP TO address. The suite of equipment and gift card will be delivered shortly thereafter. Your only problem at that point is… what excuses do you have left NOT to “start it up”?!

All StartupNation spam rules apply and StartupNation retains the right to delete any blog comments it deems to be spam. If the selected winner does not respond to instructions by March 18, another winner will be selected at random on March 19, and a similar process will be used to reach them.

Jump in! Become a winner! We look forward to reading your comments.

As always, we want you to start it up and we hope this Small Business Startup Kit helps!

Step 1: Make a detailed list documenting your production, processing, or shipping procedures

Step 2: Brainstorm ideas to shorten or simplify each one of those steps - without comprising quality or control of your final product

Step 3: Test your new procedures to ensure that they will indeed save time without causing any other unforeseen repercussions

Step 4: If the new procedure improves your operational efficiency, congratulations! If not, keep brainstorming.

Here are a couple examples of time-saving strategies to get you started:

• Instead of shipping small items in boxes, use padded envelopes (save time by not having to set up the box and they’re cheaper to ship)
• Re-organize your inventory so that the top-sellers are on the first rack for easy access (don’t just keep everything sorted alphabetically for the sake of neatness-instead focus on efficiency)
• Don’t drive to the Post Office to ship packages, schedule a free pick-up
• Set up instant messaging for employees to improve communication times (using the group feature will also allow group collaboration within seconds)
• Eliminate “double-entry”, instead focus on creating systems that are fully integrated (re-entering data is a waste of time and increases the risk of errors)
• Save time on accounting by using online banking to schedule automatic bill pays and request e-bills (some banks will even let you deposit checks via email/fax)
• Limit interruptions, instead of always starting/stopping tasks because of calls, random emails, or an occasional door-to-door salesman, set a routine to keep you focused (for example, only check emails in the morning, return phone calls in the afternoon, and require all visitors to be scheduled)

I’d love to hear your ideas…what operational changes have you made to save time and money?  Please comment below or email me heather@glamajama.com .  Also follow me at www.twitter.com/glamajama  -thanks!