Dance Through Life
Paula Callihoo's new dance studio website is now live.
10
Aug 2009
4
Aug 2009
The Gloves Are Off
I was off reading some blogs today and came across an interesting exchange in the comments section.
It started off on a technical argument, got nasty and then got personal.
When the insults on personal choices of cell phones started flying, I knew the gloves were off.
Yup, your choice of a cell phone says a lot about you.
The Mac, iMac, iPod and iPhone were all initially about going against the herd. Forget the technical arguments for a minute. People are proud that they are not getting what the majority are getting, it says something about you. And Apple? Brilliant at consumer marketing… they […]
31
Jul 2009
Age and Money – A Matter of Perspective
A business client and friend of mine is turning 50 on Monday.
For humans 50 years is a long time.
But $50 is not much money.
50 years is the same as 18,262.5 days. $18,262.5 is slightly more than what you would make on minimum wage in Alberta in a year of working full-time.
50 years is the same as 438,300 hours. $438,300 is nice.
There are 26,298,000 minutes and 1,577,880,000 seconds in 50 years.
$1.5 billion is a nice big number and few achieve it.
If you earn 1 dollar every second of your life, you can have $1.5 billion in 50 years.
Treat every second of your life as […]
29
Jul 2009
Getting Marketing Feedback
If you want unbiased feedback on your marketing material or a new product where do you go? If your answer is:
- Friends,
- Family, or
- Employees.
You should seriously reconsider.
While friends and family may try to give you honest feedback, generally they are naturally biased… they will generally tell you what you want to hear. Why? To show their support. After all, isn't that what family is all about and why you chose your friends?
Employees are influenced by balancing showing support, not making their boss annoyed, and trying to be honest.
Besides, none of these people are likely to be representative of your customers.
So valid […]
28
Jul 2009
Choosing a Content Management System
Historically we have been a Microsoft .NET shop with some experience in Java. It is not that we are against other technologies, it is just that we don’t see a reason to jump all over if the tools you have do the trick.
In the case of choosing a content management system (CMS) for our corporate website, we looked at open source and low cost CMS products on the .NET platform and found them not as mature as we needed.
We have therefore chosen Joomla as our CMS. It is a well supported and widlely used CMS developed on the PHP platform […]
27
Jul 2009
About The Value of Blogging
Seth nails the value of blogging. I do it as much for the clarity as I do for the audience.
I often find that I start out with a blog topic, start writing and by the end, my own understanding has improved. Teaching some things is like that too. It really makes you think about what and how you are doing something; sometimes you even catch mistakes in your current thinking or abilities.
27
Jul 2009
Marketing Budget Allocation For Results
As per the last two posts (The Value of a New Customer and Marketing Budget 101) I talked about one way of determining your marketing/sales budget.
If you want a simpler method, allocate a percentage of total revenue.
Now the question is where to spend your money for maximum effect.
There are basically four sources of future sales:
- Existing customers,
- Referrals (word of mouth),
- Prospecting, cold calling and networking, and
- New leads from marketing.
You will want to allocate funding (or effort) to […]
23
Jul 2009
Marketing Budget 101
Now that you know how much you are willing to spend on acquiring a new customer the next part is easy… and very hard.
How many new customers do you want?
Infinity is a good long-term goal for the highly competitive but lets bound the question a bit.
How many new customers can you handle over the next year?
Consider your ability to:
- Service or supply your customers,
- Your ability to grow your capacity including capital costs and time to do so, and
- How big you really want to be and other factors.
Don't forget to include any customers you might lose over time in the equation.
Now […]
22
Jul 2009
The Lifetime Value of a New Customer
One of things you need to do for your business is to determine the lifetime value of a customer or client. This is the lifetime income from that customer to your business and should include factors such as:
- Amount spent per year (minimum, maximum and average) on your products or services,
- Expected duration of relationship (min, max and average),
- If you have multiple levels of products/services you will also need to consider the likelihood of moving them up the value chain.
Now determine the fixed and variable costs in delivery your product or service. Fixed costs are those that you have regardless […]
21
Jul 2009
Clean Code (a la Mode)
Clean Code
Our team recently wrote some code for a client of ours to handle user authentication through Silverlight. It was largely from scratch and implemented a lot of business logic both in Silverlight and on the server.
The nice parts: clean code with lots of unit tests… and a very happy client. Good work team.
Silverlight
Microsoft's Silverlight platform is starting to mature quite well with Version 3.0. Our developers are getting quite good working with it… so much so we are seriously considering switching from an AJAX web browser application to Silverlight part way into a project. If it will speed up future development the […]