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Body: I finish up today my 3 weeks here in the USA. I’ve been attending 10 days of extremely intense training, and two conferences in two different states. I’ve been here while the US economy takes a major nose dive. The Australian economy whilst currently not affected as much as the US economy is non the less affected.  I fly home tonight to an uncertain future. In my personal life, there is turmoil. In the business world it looks like a global financial crash is happening. The Aussie dollar has dropped from a high of .98 USD a month or … Continue reading Future Uncertain…

Body: Back in the early 90’s I worked for a large PC Manufacturer called AST Research here in Australia. AST was at the time the #3 PC manufacturer in the world and here in Australia we did pretty darned well with market share and our fair share of named accounts including Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, GIO and a host of others that I can’t even remember now.  Back then I worked in the Tech Team and one of my responsibilities at one point was the support / RA department. So I know a little about how phone support used to work … Continue reading Vendors and Phone Support – it’s almost non existent today…

Body: To the sounds of evil laughter, I’ve swallowed the blue pill 🙂 Well almost. Today I started working with Microsoft Australia. My role here will be Tech Specialist on SBS and EBS and I’ll be helping very much with the launch of SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 here in Australia over the next 6 months.  Robbie approached me to see if I would be interested in working with Microsoft to help build the SBS/EBS community here in Australia. I felt it was a chance I could not let pass to be able to work form the inside and help … Continue reading Moving over to the dark side.. 🙂

Body: I didn’t know about it until today, but the New South Wales government have labelled this week as Home Based Business week and they are running a host of seminars all around the state all related to home based and small business.  Looking through the topics, it looks like they are covering some very interesting information and I wish I’d found out about it earlier so I could attend. Anyway – the link is here and I’ll be watching out for it in future. Category: Business Focus Published: 20/05/2008 6:07 PM

Body: Microsoft Australia are doing a cute viral marketing campaign which is aimed to raise awareness of it’s Office 2007 product and at the same time donate money to charity.  They have said they will donate up to $100,000 to charity based on this campaign.  Nice one Microsoft. Anyway – they way they are doing this is via viral marketing.  They’ve got some cute kids telling us all about Office 2007, what they think Microsoft is… I love that bit. Anyway – go check out their site here Category: Business Focus Published: 20/05/2008 8:24 AM

Body: In a great example of Microsoft listening to the SBSC partners and learning from their mistakes, Robbie has advised that they are marketing to our SMB customers.  http://blogs.technet.com/sbsaustralia/archive/2008/05/15/microsoft-smb-customer-profiling-a-follow-up.aspx Thank you Microsoft for letting us know about this.  It shows that you have learnt from your last experience 🙂  I look forward to hearing more about what you learn about our customers so that together we can help the customers build their business. Category: Business Focus Published: 19/05/2008 10:19 PM

Body: Interesting question huh.  Many of us in the SMB IT Pro sector have more fallen into our business rather than actively planned our business.  As such many of us treat it more as a hobby that we make money out of than a business that can sustain itself.  Is that the wrong thing to do?  I mean a hobby is very enjoyable and the passion we put into a hobby means we often get some amazing results.  So what is wrong with making a hobby into a business?  With a hobby you often make investments with no real plan … Continue reading Are you running a business or a hobby?

Body: Another round of blogs that I read focused on the business side of SMB IT consulting.  Some of these are not direct answers to your business problems, but ideas for future directions you might want to take.  BlogStorm Online Marketing is one of those.  This site talks about how to use your website to get higher rankings with the various search engines.  Customers that already know you and your products will likely know where your website is.  However new customers won’t and this is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes in.  There’s some interesting ideas here in this site, … Continue reading Business Blogs I read – Pt 2

Body: I get asked from time to time by many SMB IT consultants about which business blogs to read.  Here’s a few that have interesting stuff on them this week.  I’d recommend you take a look and see for yourself if they strike a chord with you. Small Business Trends – this has some great info, normally focused on the USA, but equally applicable across the globe.  They have a post today offering 100 of the best kept marketing secrets.  Check it out here  This book is assembled based on community input which is a neat idea. Flying Solo – … Continue reading Business Blogs I read

Body: Well – it does look like Vodafone are blowing their chance in the SMB Reseller channel here in Australia.  Let’s look at some of the issues that I’ve heard of / experienced over the last 3 months. First they provide wrong information to the channel as I experienced here Then they in conjunction with Ingram Micro can’t get their processes together http://blog.sbsfaq.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=96 We’ve had many many variations in the process that we’re supposed to go through to get these things connected. Resellers have reports that the Notebook Data Card is never in stock – in fact I know of … Continue reading Vodafone blow it in the SMB Reseller channel