Municipal Elections and the Corporate Vote

In 1993, after a review, Mike Harcourt took away the vote from from corporations. But as our electoral system comes under review – including looking seriously at proportional representation in municipal elections – the issue of the corporate vote is again on the table. 

An article in the Georgia Straight outlines the major issues. The argument against it is, basically, One Person, One Vote: if its managers already vote as individuals, why should a business get an additional vote? The argument for, as voiced by John Winter, president of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, is that because businesses pay higher taxes, they should have more influence. It's worth noting however that one proposal on the table would only see those business owners who do not already have a ballot to cast in the municipality given a vote as a business.

What do you think? Should businesses – which pay taxes, buy permits, and have to abide by the rules of their municipality – be able to cast a vote in civic elections? Or does the idea encroach on the essence of democracy, that is, the rule of people by the people?

What's Up with Millennials?

Scrolling through my Twitter feed the other day, I came across this article about Generation Y on the Forbes.com. Titled "Millennials seek work's benefits: leisure, money," it got me thinking about the generational differences I've observed and discussed with other business owners.

• More: The Gen Y Guide in BCBusiness

The generalizations run something like this: young kids these days – Millennials or, if you prefer, Gen Y – want it all but don't want to work for it, whereas we haggard old folks (I say with a 34-year-old tongue planted firmly in my cheek) know the value of a hard day's work and are willing to earn our rewards.

I'll admit, I've been on the lead end of this discussion more than once. That said, what exactly is wrong with wanting more vacation time and decent compensation?

Lauren and I started our company 10 years ago, wanting more autonomy, money, and job satisfaction. (And we belong to Gen X, not Gen Y, so my suspicion is that the desire for these things isn't specific to youngsters, however oversized their expectations.)

Is it wrong to expect some time off and a decent wage, even in the early stages of your career – or are these things you earn only after putting in your time? Are Gen Ys too entitled? Thoughts?

The Perks of Small Business

I have a bee in my bonnet about employee perks. Maybe it hearkens back to my pre-entrepreneurial days, during the dot-com boom, when it seemed like every internet startup in town was furnishing their office with the requisite foosball table, fridges full of caffeinated drinks, and a couch where employees could crash during all-night coding marathons.

Somehow, none of those things ever seemed like a perk to me. The caffeine and couches felt like flimsy compensation – and encouragement – for the crazy amounts of overtime employees were expected to work. (These were the days when a group of high-tech industry leaders campaigned successfully for an exemption to BC's labour laws so that they wouldn't be bound by the same standards other companies must follow with regard to overtime tracking and compensation.) And foosball has never been my preferred method of letting off steam. (If I'm honest, foosball always felt like a dude thing – and more specifically, a young, childless dude thing. And although there are lots of young, childless dudes in the tech industry, those of us who don't fit that mode need perks, too.)

Now, I'm certain there are lots of people for whom a foosball table in the workplace is a source of great joy and a catalyst for office camaraderie. It's just that I have a thing for, you know, leaving the office to have fun. I prefer to get out for a breath of fresh air, or go grab a few drinks with my colleagues.

Don't get me wrong – I think there's room for fun in the workplace, too. I just think fun doesn't need extra square footage on the rent bill – nor does it need to be earned with long hours. When I was working for other people, I always felt I'd rather have a few extra bucks on my paycheque that I could spend on my favourite pursuits, rather than a playspace at the office. So when it came time to dream up perks for my staff, I kept them pragmatic, and tried to make them as broadly appealing as possible. 

I doubt many people would consider a monthly transit pass to be as fun as a foosball table, but for our company, providing our staff with free transportation to & from work is both a nice way to save everyone a bit of spending money, and a practical step towards reducing our business's carbon footprint. When there's profit to spare, we give out cash bonuses (and on one memorable occasion, iPhones all around - we justified them as tools of the trade, but they're hella fun). And we endeavour to keep good dark chocolate in the office at all times. (I guess that's our caffeine vehicle of choice.)

But I think the biggest perk we offer is our no-overtime rule. It's highly unconventional in our industry, but we believe that when everyone gets to go home at five and keep their weekends for themselves and their families, they're happier and more productive. And that's good business.

I'd love to hear from you about your favourite perks, both as employers and employees. What makes for a good perk? What little extras make all the difference? And where could that money be better spent?

Business Opportunities of Open Source

A couple of weeks back, I was asked to sit on a panel discussing business tips for a particularly geeky crowd. The group in question comprises users and coders with a passion for a piece of open-source software called Drupal – the Content Management System that, among many others, powers WhiteHouse.gov, The Onion, Amnesty International, and the one you're reading now.

The evening's discussion was about how to run a business as an open-source software vendor. We traded tips on staffing, sales, customer service, and pricing, and every piece of information I picked up has immediate, concrete value for me.

There's something the broader business community can learn from the Drupal folks: how open-source software can benefit your company.

Open-source software is licensed in such a way that anyone can use, copy, change, improve, and redistribute it. Where most proprietary software is developed behind closed doors, with NDAs and non-compete agreements flying around, open-source software is generally planned, coded, and documented by large, distributed, global communities of developers.

Open-source software is free in three important ways:

1. Free as in free speech: You can take your software and do just about anything you want with it: remix, customize, extend, or share it.
2. Free as in beer: Most open-source software is released without license fees, meaning there is no charge to download and install it.
3. Free as in kittens: This is my favourite open-source truism. Although open-source software often doesn't have licensing costs attached to it, it can prove costly to customize and keep up to date – and you often wind up paying a commercial vendor to provide support, since there's no money-back guarantee (or hidden price tag to cover the product's support costs).

So, if open-source software is so free and fabulous, why isn't everyone using it?

It's not just the marketing budgets at Apple and Microsoft. The biggest reason is that there's some truly great software out there that doesn't yet have a truly great open-source alternative. Our business, for example, uses a mix of open and proprietary applications. On the proprietary side, we run Macs with their native OS X operating systems; we use Adobe Creative Suite for our design work; and we're all bopping our heads to iTunes on a daily basis.

A year ago, we ditched Microsoft's Office suite in favour of OpenOffice (or more specifically, NeoOffice, which is a Mac-specific OpenOffice install), and I definitely don't miss the animated paper clip. NeoOffice has saved significant spending on license fees, a boon that shows its face every time we hire a new employee. We're also fans of the Firefox web browser, and especially the rich library of add-ons that make our coding work infinitely more efficient (not to mention how easy it is to check the weather).

Chances are, there's an open-source package out there that can save your business money and give you  functionality you don't currently have. You should consider who you're going to call for support, though. If you've got in-house tech support, you'll be fine, but for those of us too small for an IT department, it's best to look for consultants specializing in the open-source software you're considering. As with Drupal, there's a whole community of geeks out there ready to provide you with commercial support for your open-source products.

Love Thy Customers

Judging by some of the links I've been sent lately, there are a lot of us who struggle to find decent clients, let alone fabulous ones. But when a great client comes along, it's occasion to celebrate – and not just because they save you from griping about how tough your work is. There's a strong business case for focusing on your best customers and showing them some appreciation.

The legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser composed a marvellous list called "Ten Things I Have Learned," wherein Lesson Number One is this: You can only work for people that you like.

He says "work for," because his life's work involved hiring himself out to clients for design projects; but the same principle applies to people developing products, serving the public, running retail shops, or just about any business model I can think of.

What does Glaser mean by only working for people you like? Here's his explanation:

I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection.

I couldn't agree more; and moreover, I would argue that having warm & friendly relationships with your customers is not only the path to doing better work, but it also helps you stay profitable and competitive.

Great clients aren't just more fun. They make more business sense.

Your best customers are often your most profitable, because in my experience, good clients rarely nickel-and-dime you; they may (and realistically, should) have budget limits, but they'll share them with you and invite you to help them spend that budget in the most efficient way possible. They come back to you again and again, saving you money on landing new customers; and they send their friends your way (and those friends tend to be good clients, too).

They make you more competitive, because they take the time to find out what you do best, and send good business your way. They trust you enough that you can stretch your wings and do better work, which in turn attracts attention from prospective customers, media, your peers, and prospective employees.

And, as anyone who's had a great client knows, you'll have more fun at work. In fact, work will have a lot more in common with play than you might have thought possible.

So, how do you attract great customers?

For some of us, the first step towards a full roster of dream clients may be ditching a few bad ones. If all your time is taken up dealing with a handful of problem clients, you won't have any time or energy left over to cultivate good relationships.

Beyond that, there's not a lot of science to it: this stuff is all about the same relationship skills you use in every area of your life. Learn to listen well, ask good questions, communicate clearly, and be yourself. One brilliant online marketer, Colleen Wainwright, sums up the three rules of effective online communication:

1. Be Useful.
2. Be Specific.
3. Be Nice.

Those are pretty good rules for building good customer relationships, too. This is all about building trust, and that's something you have to earn.

Keep your friends close, and your best customers closer

When I work with a dream client, I make sure they know how much I appreciate them. At our firm, we like to send bouquets of flowers to our clients when they launch a new website – and invariably this small gesture is greeted with enthusiastic gratitude. (An aside: our male clients seem to love it even more than the women, perhaps because they rarely get a nice bunch of flowers to brighten up their offices.)

If flowers aren't in your budget, you'd be amazed at what a difference a thank-you card makes, especially to a customer who has sent you a referral or perhaps simply made your work a lot more pleasant. A little gratitude goes a long way in a world where people increasingly feel anonymous -- when someone I do business with takes the time to thank me for supporting their company, it affirms my sense that I've made the right choice, and it gives me an added incentive to come back.

Affection, trust, appreciation: These are words we don't always associate with business and profit. But as customers, we intuitively feel all these things towards our favourite businesses, whether they are neighbourhood grocers or international retailers. As business owners, it behooves us to take a moment to focus on the customers who make us feel that way, and consider what we can do to find more of them.

A Hiring Tool for Small Business Owners

Look inside any small business – from a one-person show to a small team – and you'll see a group of motivated people who routinely wear many hats. Most entrepreneurs are apt multi-taskers, and, as a small businessperson, I look for team members who are comfortable stepping outside their job description.

The many-hat-wearing job description is a feature of life inside a small business, but it has its perils. It's easy, for example, for small businesses to get stuck with an overqualified person – often the owner – performing everyday tasks that prevent her doing the work that really adds value to the business.

Lauren and I recently learned an exercise that I've since encouraged many other entrepreneurs to use. It takes only a few minutes, and it gets to the core of making sure everyone is doing the work she should be doing.

Here it is: Take a stack of Post-It notes and write down everything you and your employees do – from checking email and answering the phone to invoicing, bank deposits, and the production end of your business.

Next, break things down into their component tasks. In this way, "sales" might turn into several Post-Its: in-person meetings, follow-up phone calls, research, proposal writing, etc. Arrange the tasks into columns by person and see how evenly the work is spread out. To decide what to move out of a person's column ask yourself one simple question: Is this task the best use of this person's time?

If you have a senior staffer loaded with administrative tasks a junior could do, move it out of the senior's column. Now take all your orphaned tasks and see if they can be put together into a new position. The job description writes itself.

In a small business this is not going to be cut and dry. Often, some staff will need to keep a few tasks that in a larger company would be off their plates. Not to worry: even if you can't change it now, it's worth flagging them as belonging to a position you'd like to hire down the road.

Now we arrive at the trickiest parts of this exercise: moving things off your own plate. As a business owner it's easy to be a control enthusiast, and to assume that it's cheaper for you to keep doing the little daily things instead of letting go and hiring someone. Don't make this mistake.

The key is to value the very limited time that you have and make sure you're doing work of the highest value to your business. I have a colleague whose mentor recently challenged her to focus only on the tasks that grew her brand and increased sales. After all, if she's not doing that vital and strategic work, who is?

Are you?