This makes me laugh



because when you are in the early stages of a start up you really put to use all resources that you have at your disposal. Sometimes it is that friend that built the car from the bathtub.

Ever looked to your friend that does programming or design on a freelance basis to design your website for cheap? We've either done this or considered it.

When I first started out I asked my classmates to help me with designing some of our branding material, asked my brother to do some of the front-end coding and professors to help with business strategy and contacts.

Looking at this comic strip now just reminds me of those things - not that this means I'm not reaching out to the still limited but growing resources that I have worked to build for PeerFX; I think it's economical and sometimes better to reach out to my internal network first before going to the external market for help.

Here's why. I once had an idea to build an online contest website to get the word out there for PeerFX. I went to a couple companies and got a quote and one came back with a price tag of $25,000. This is for a one page flash page that's like a mini-game.

Let's just say when I saw the quote I thought they added an additional zero before the decimal place by mistake. The logic didn't work very well either - this one page mini-game apparently needed 2 project managers and 3 designers and 500 programmers (yes I am exaggerating but you get the idea...)

So that's the reason why it's more economical to look to your internal network because your friends probably won't try anything stupid like this. It can also be more efficient because you won't have a team of 10 people assigned to a one page project and 8 of them playing rocks, papers, scissors for the whole day with nothing to do.

Go Dilbert.

2 Tips to Get Your Dream Job

Image via Wikipedia

The new book I've been reading is called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman.  So the bottom line to getting your dream job and acing the interview is to be likable.  Yes - it's as simple as that.  Despite the fact that many interviewers stress on the qualifications and personal skills of the candidate, studies have shown that the most likable candidate usually gets the job.

Here are 2 tips to help you ace an interview:

1. Talking about mistakes that you have made in the past is a sign of openness and increases your ranking on the likability scale.
2. Talking about your strengths and past successes towards the end of your interview shows that you are humble and modest, which increases your likability factor.

Easily said and hopefully easily done!

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• Richard Wiseman - "59 Seconds" (eyeonbooks.com)

An Update of Where We Are

It's been a week since I've written and here's a little update to let you know what PeerFX has been busy with.

1. Preparing for our FINTRAC audit - which took place yesterday - I did expect them to find some deficiencies in record keeping with some of our initial customer records when our online system was still in testing.  Knowing your friends and family isn't enough - you still need to write down their ID numbers.  Sorry mom - FINTRAC made me do it.
2. Completing our new system - it will look nicer, be easier to work with and much more secure in its foundation setup and scalability.  It will also be the platform that we build our multi-currency system on.  I'm excited.  Are you?
3. SALES: The good news is that the first week of March has brought us some awesome sales numbers.  Would love to have this trend keep going for the rest of the month.  We were busy throughout the week getting deals done; gotta love it.
4. MONEY:  Yes - the other side of the equation is getting investment in so that we can invest in development, salespeople and marketing.  Tough but possible - I'm on it!

Amongst the 4 things above, I am also putting out fires everyday as all managers and other execs do.  Oh yay!

Working ON and not IN the Business All the Time

So I asked my advisor Raymond about this today: If you were asked to put money into PeerFX today what would you be looking for?

Raymond works actively with us and asking him this question would let me know where the main problematic areas of the business are.  Running this business I feel that more often than I would like I am working in the business rather than on the business. It really takes someone that is further out from the center of the business to give me another perspective on what the priorities should be.  I have my own set of priorities, but what matters most to parties that I need buy-in from? 

Here were the four things that Raymond mentioned:

1. Sales funnel and a cult-like adherence to a process. Also included in the funnel is a estimate of $ value/qualified prospect with probability of close within 30, 60 and 90 days. This way we see actual sales and a projected discounted sales pipeline.  Great suggestion - we're definitely focusing too much on signing up clients and not doing the greatest job of keeping track of our sales activities.  This needs to be cleaned up in the next week.

2. Product Mgmt process: where new products or services are contemplated. This is the where we work ON the business and not IN the business  Like I said, this is what I need to work on - there's one problem - I can't delegate a lot of the work that I handle such as banking operations and transaction processing.

3. Customer satisfaction metrics. - this is extremely important for us since our business depends heavily on recurring transactions.  We are working on several ideas to pump up recurring transactions and we will see results this month.

4. A peer or formal board and mgmt review every month (using some sort of Balanced Score Card) I have admittedly been slacking in this area; we do have a weekly progress review with Raymond but my Toronto advisors are probably wondering what the heck is going on out in Vancouver.  This can be fixed by simply sharing our meeting minutes from every week with our advisors.  Smack myself on the head - why am I not doing that already?

I encourage you to ask yourself and your advisors similar questions on a continual basis.  The more often you work ON the business and not IN the business, it will help focus your thoughts on where to take the business.  Admit where in the business things are going wrong and work to improve it!

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