A big thanks to our friends and partners at Commerce Bank for giving us the opportunity to be their business of the week.

The chance to be a business of the week is a benefit Commerce offers their business clients. It goes a long way in actually demonstrating that they want to be our partner and see and help us succeed.

There’s no cost to Commerce to do this, and only minimal work– all they do is maintain a schedule of business who can take advantage of this opportunity to promote themselves.

Kudos to Commerce for going beyond saying they want to be our partner to actually being our partner.

What could your company offer to clients that would make them as grateful and aligned as Commerce makes us?

Today we had a “speed networking” event with members of our private sector network (as part of the InnerCity Entrepreneurs program). I met a gentleman with over 35 years of experience managing and growing companies named David Kimball who has a lot of great advice to share.

For the past few months I’ve been focusing on the steps necessary to grow 3000k into a larger and more sophisticated business. We’re growing our staff, focusing on our process, and delegating tasks and responsibilities. Mr. Kimball, in a 10-minute session, was able to offer great insight into this process. His advice: transition from being a craftsperson to a teacher/mentor.

What David was referring to is growing from an individual with a set of task-specific skills to someone who can teach others - employees, partners, outside contractors - and help them learn the process, skills, and knowledge to perform those tasks. I can’t grow the business and do everything at the same time. In order to reach the next level it’s vital for me to work with everyone here and make sure they become expert in their area and in how we do business.

I’ve been feeling this for months but Mr. Kimball was able to quickly and succinctly express what’s required. Great advice, and a testament to how indispensable experience really is.

We often think of our “team” as being the people we see every day, like the people in the office or in our department. I used to have clear buckets for team members - if you’re part of 3000k you’re on the team. Today I had an argument with someone who’s a partner of ours and realized that it wasn’t fair because we’re both working for the same goals. We are, in fact, on the same team.

It turns out your team isn’t just the people you see every day. It’s not the people you share and office or department or company with. Your team is the people who are working toward the same goals as you.

This is what defines a team in sports. Each player has a different role but everyone works together to win. It’s the same in business. Your company, partners, customers, shareholders, and vendors are all on the same team. You’re working together to become more and to win.

Funny how the world changes when you realize that Apple, Rackspace, and the insurance company are playing ball with you.

To Steve Jobs: catch!

On a yearly basis we, like many companies, hold performance reviews. These are private one-on-one meetings to clarify job responsibilities, recognize and appreciate a person’s strengths, identify their weaknesses and address strategies to mitigate or adapt to those weaknesses.

Traditionally this ends up being a rather one-way review which, in some situations, results in the boss preaching in a parental manner to their staff. I once worked for a boss who was terrible and failed to do his job well or to even understand what he should do, given everyone else’s tasks. He only recognized weaknesses that he also shared and hypocritically focused on those during reviews. When the staff gathered later for lunch or break this resulted in a lot of frustrated laughs and a lack of respect for our boss. There was very little change or improvement.

Our reviews at 3000k counter this by being two-way. As the owner I review a person’s performance and they do the same for me. We both prepare written evaluations with suggestions for improvement prior to meeting so we have documents to reference and benchmark against during future reviews.

I’ve found this to be an invaluable way to start a conversation with my staff about how I could improve my work, and how we can better work together to mitigate the weaknesses we’ve discussed. I often have as much or more to improve than the person I’ve been reviewing!

This process shows that I’m open to change and feedback, that I care about what employees think of how I’m working and want their ideas on how to improve, and that I want to talk about these issues. It then gives me a chance to set a good example by working to improve, or a good understanding of how hard it can be to change if I don’t alter my weaknesses and need to help staff with the same problem. We’re only human.

So start a conversation. Have a two-way performance review and see what feedback you get from your boss, or have to give. It’ll make you both better at what you do and probably identify ways to work together you’ve never thought of that make the most of your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

After going through a few template revisions of a web application we’ve been developing, I became stuck. I just couldn’t get the interface to look like it was supposed to be used the way it was intended. The issue was that the interface was a set of tabs, each containing form fields, organized by columns. The challenge was to make the interface, which was basically a spreadsheet, to feel not so spreadsheet-like.

The ‘Ah-ha!’ moment came when I realized what it was we were really trying to achieve with the interface, on a very basic level. We were organizing tabular data, so the solution really became quite obvious. Instead of ‘divs’ and ’spans’, organize the interface using ‘tables’.

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Reuters, the big international news wire service, announced yesterday that it’s opening a new news bureau. Ho hum, right? Maybe not. It’s opening that news bureau in Linden, the home of Second Life, which is an online video game (more or less).

A new bureau in a video game.

Reuters, a major international company probably not much disposed to flights of fancy or having their employees waste time on video games while at work, has assigned one reporter, full time, to cover the news and events going on in this world (it’s more of a world, really, than a video game. It’s an online simulation of real life).

This might seem a bit weird, or even irrelevant to your business, but it’s not. Second Life, you see, has ties to real-world companies and real-world dollars. In fact, according to the Second Life website nearly US$500,000 is spent in the in-game economy each day. Those are not virtual dollars, but real ones that users deposit to purchase in-game items like houses, investments, and consumer goods from real-world business.

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When discussing search engine placement and marketing options with clients and prospects, we’re often asked “How can I get into the Top 10 results at Google?” or “Can you guarantee me placement?”

The short answer to both questions is the same: “No company can guarantee you specific placement in search engines.”

Our colleagues in the web development and marketing worlds probably already know this, but clients often don’t and it’s not said often enough by people selling search placement and marketing.

In the interest of conserving your time, I’ll refer you to these resources on search engine basics - Wikipedia’s Search Engine Placement entry and Search Engine Watch - and say this: Any business that guarantees you a specific search engine ranking is either not telling whole the truth or not showing you the caveats in their offering.

This is because “natural” or “organic” search results are determined by a secret formula used by search engines. Since each engine’s formula is secret, there’s no way anyone can guarantee a particular placement using it. Search engines make this even trickier by tweaking their formulae regularly (some as often as monthly).

Even though search positioning is a moving target, that doesn’t mean that it’s fumbling in the dark. The industry knows some things that search engines look at to rank sites (just not how much weight each element is given). These things include: how long a site has been online, the quality of the code, the frequency of updates, the text of the site, links to the site from other sites, and, though less so for Google these days, meta tags.

Even with this knowledge, search placement and marketing is more art than science. A campaign to achieve great natural search placement takes time, usually months or more. Search engine placement is an ongoing process that requires tweaking text and links, generating new links at other sites, experimenting with new techniques, and more. It’s not something you can do just once.

Search engine placement and marketing is a complex task. And it can pay huge dividends for your business. But be aware: when someone is telling you just what you want to hear about it - that you can get the ranking you want, guaranteed, and that it will happen quickly - back away. They can’t really deliver what you need.

P.S. - There is one way to come closer to a solid guarantee of placement in search results. That’s by paying for placement using pay-per-click ads (a great tool, by the way). More on those another time.

As a client, you should always be sure to keep your web agency informed about your marketing plans, no matter if they’re online or offline. I’m thinking about that this week thanks to one of our clients.

This client is planning a new online marketing campaign that could drive 100,000 users or more to their website over the course of just a few days. Terrific for the client, right? In some ways - but not so terrific if the load of all that traffic causes their website to be slow, or worse, to crash.

Throwing 100,000 new users at a site on a given day or in a week is a lot of new traffic. Not being able to plan for extra capacity for that kind of thing, especially on a shared server, can easily lead to disaster.

Luckily, our client mentioned this to us before they started the ad campaign and we’ve been able to create contingency plans to ensure that no matter how well this campaign goes, their site can handle the load and neither they nor any other clients will be negatively affected.

This situation, though, is a prime example of how important it is for clients to keep their web agencies in the loop about their marketing initiatives, no matter what medium those campaigns are taking place in.

If, for instance, this client hadn’t mentioned the situation to us, it could have caused serious problems and we would have been left scrambling to fix them after the fact, rather than planning for them ahead of time.

By letting your web agency know what you’re planning, they’ll be able to ensure that things flow smoothly and that a crashed server doesn’t interfere with the effectiveness of your campaign. Even better, they may be able to help increase the effectiveness of that campaign. There are techniques that web agencies can use to help better track difficult-to-measure media like radio or print (we use these techniques with a number of clients to great success) and to convert more visitors driven to the site by the campaign.

Bottom line? When you’re planning a big new marketing initiative or other business change, make sure that everyone who needs to know about it does - in your departments, at your marketing company, and at your web agency.

A recent interaction with a client got me thinking about how doing something that seems like helping a client can later come back to hurt your business. Here’s the situation:

We’ve worked for a few years with this client. Let’s call them Client A. We were connected to Client A through another client and built a site for Client A’s former employer. Client A then went out on their own to start a new company. We built that site, too.

Because we liked Client A, we gave them a bit of a break on price, especially as they were a new business. That price break cost us some, but we figured it was worth maintaining the relationship and helping a new business get off the ground.

Once that business was up and running, Client A started another. We built this website as well. This time, the client had an even smaller budget than before, and though we wouldn’t take a site with a budget this small from a new prospect, we took this one in order to maintain the relationship and because we like Client A.

Again, the decision cost us, and the last few legs of the project were rocky because the client wanted more than the budget allowed, but we eventually launched a good site for them.

In the last few weeks, the client asked us to give a quote on a new project. We decided that we couldn’t keep giving big discounts on work for this client, because we’d done it twice already and because we’re too busy to handle that right now. So we quoted the project at our standard rates.

Client A wasn’t very happy about this price and is now using another web developer for that project. It’s possible that we’ve lost them as a client altogether, which wasn’t our goal.

And here’s the unusual thing: The problem isn’t with the client. It’s with us.

By giving those price breaks and not telling the client about them, we trained the client to expect our services at a certain price. Rather than giving this client out standard price, we tried to “help them out” and reduced our prices. When the most recent quote came in so much higher, of course Client A was surprised! That’s what we’d trained them to expect and they probably had no context to understand why the price had been raised so much.

So, by trying to help and cutting our rates in a few instances, we caused a long-term problem, may have lost a client, and have left the client feeling badly towards us. Pretty far from our original goal of trying to maintain a relationship and help a new business get a solid start, huh?

Bottom line? Giving “hidden” discounts and cutting prices to meet the client’s budget rather than charging what the project actually costs is a bad strategy for the long-term. It’s tempting to do, but as 3000K matures we’re not going to do it.

Unfortunately, we had to learn that lesson in a way that may have damaged a good client relationship. I hope that’s not the case, but perhaps it’s the price of learning and maturing. And it’s too bad.

Something we’ve learned in the last few years is that how you say goodbye to a client is just as important as how you say hello to them.

A lot of people are most concerned about saying hello, getting to start working with a client, convincing them you’re the right company for their needs, but by the time a client is ready to leave, companies and their staff frequently don’t think about how they say goodbye. They just do it, and do it oftentimes in an angry way.

Of course no one likes to lose clients, but it happens to everyone and how you deal with it says a lot about you as a company.

We try to say hello and goodbye in the same way. You don’t find this at all companies, of course. More than once we’ve taken over an account from another web developer or web host and found them to be less than cooperative in helping their client transition to us.

We try to be as cooperative as possible. For instance, this week we completed the transition of one of our oldest clients to another provider. They left not because they were unhappy with us, but because the path they want to pursue and the path that we’re walking aren’t the same anymore.

We didn’t fight their transition, we worked with it. We were in constant communication with them and their new web company to make sure the transition went smoothly and that their business wasn’t interrupted.

Thanks to this, instead of this client disappearing into the ‘Net, they sent us a nice email, thanking us for our help and the service we’d provided them over the years. A much nicer way to end a business relationship than with anger on both sides, right?

And relationships are really what this philosophy is all about. No industry or region is so big that you can afford to treat people consistently badly. You never know when you’ll run into an old client again (at a new job for them or for you, for instance) and leaving them with a bad taste will poison any chance you had of working with them again.

For 3000K, since so much of our business is built on networking, relationships, and referrals, this would be potentially fatal.

Instead, by concentrating on how we say hello and goodbye to clients, we’re able to maintain relationships, keep the door open for future collaboration, and keep ourselves on client’s mental lists of comapnies to refer when the time comes.

It makes a big difference.