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Your Small Business – Hiring Family Members

When you start a small business, the idea of hiring employees can be overwhelming. You may be concerned about your ability to pay these employees regularly.

Additionally, you may be worried about your ability to trust them with your business and manage them effectively. For this reason, many people hire family members to work for them.

However, hiring family members can have its pros and cons.

Consider Carefully

When hiring family members you need to consider their qualifications. Never hire a family member because of familiarity alone.

Take an unbiased look at their actual qualifications and determine whether or not they would enhance your business. Regardless of how comfortable you are with someone, first and foremost they must be able to do the job at hand – no matter who they are.

There is no right or wrong answer as to whether or not you should or shouldn’t hire family members to work in your small business. On one hand, a family member gives you a sense of security unfound with an unfamiliar employee.

However, it can change the dynamic of your relationship with them.

Establish Clear Guidelines

That is why it is important to establish clear guidelines regarding professional conduct and your business relationship.

When hiring family members it is important to first view them as an applicant and consider their value as an employee. It is important to maintain professional guidelines so that your business is not affected by your personal relationships.

Once you are certain that they are qualified for the position and you are certain of their ability to be professional you can hire them with a sense of confidence.

Original post by Buzz

As everyone is preparing for Halloween this evening, we thought we’d share some interesting reading for those freelancer’s with their porch lights off trying to avoid the trick-or-treaters. On a dark and scary night, who wouldn’t want to read about design and small business tips. Consider it virtual candy!

Jacob from Six Revision gives us 20 websites for learning Adobe Illustrator. I’m sure you’ll like this resources-filled one!

Proportion is a very important part of designing for the web! Lauren explains it all in “Enhance Your Designs With The Principle Of Proportion“.

Have you ever wondered how you can get some free advertisement on Google? Try Google Maps! Jacob walks us through the process on Just Creative Design.

Does it happen you wish you would’ve charged more for a certain project? Our very own Dave Navarro wrote a post on Freelance Folder titled “When a Client Can’t Afford You: Why It’s Still Better to Bid High“.

The pet peeve of every freelancer: deadlines! Taiyab shares with us some good techniques on meeting (or beating) deadlines.

Does your business have the support it needs? Good question! Sonia wrote a killer post on the topic at Remarkable Communication.

Humm, should we stop looking for inspiration? James Chartrand of Men With Pens wrote a very interesting post on Copyblogger about that!

Yellow, green, red, blue… have you ever wondered what impact colors can have in direct marketing?

For those of you looking for some inspiration, SpyreMag has a list of 25 great blog designs from which to draw inspiration.

Ever wondered if your website looks the same in all browsers? Look no further! Steven has a list of 10 tools to help you with that on DesignM.ag!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

Undeniably, one of the most difficult things about working at home is keeping people from perpetually distracting you during the workday, simply because you’re right there and they have nothing better to do. Or want you to take the trash out right then and there (hey, it has happened to me!).

To get anything done, you’ve really got to guard the home office and its status as a distraction-free zone. You’ve got to guard it so fiercely, you might even call it guarding the sanctity of the office. Here are five methods I use for keeping distractions at bay.

1. Door Closed, Door Half-Closed, Door Open

I created some signals regarding the level of concentration I require at any given time by assigning different rules for when the office door is closed, half-open, or fully open.

In my home, if the door is closed, I’m not to be interrupted. I’m focusing, I’m churning through my work and trying to get to the other end of the day. I’m probably putting together an article or working through a marketing plan. Unless my boy has cracked his head open on the wall corner or my wife’s gone into labor, I don’t want to know about it.

If the door is half-closed, I’m more susceptible to an interruption, but it shouldn’t be a frivolous interruption; only come in if you plan on telling me something reasonably important and do it quickly. If my wife wants to tell me she’s ducking out to the shops, that’s fine, but I don’t want to hear what just happened on Neighbours. Obviously for women who work at home, it’s probably the latest episode of Rex’s Fishing you don’t want to hear about from your spouse, but you get the point either way!

I don’t actually assign a meaning to “door open”—I can’t work when it is totally open, so there’s no point being in the office at all if it is. But many people do find this useful and can get things done even with that glaring gap in the wall that I despise so much.

The best part about this method is that it doesn’t seem draconian and all-or-nothing, so those you live with are more likely to accept it. It’s not rude or selfish to impose such rules on your own family; they couldn’t interrupt you if you were at a real office, and there’s no reason they should feel entitled to just because you’re at home.

2. Headphones On, Outside World Off

Headphones are great. I have a nice pair that I bought for mixing and monitoring in the studio, and the benefit of this is that it does a really good job at blocking outside noise from reaching my ears.

Get some decent ‘phones, plug ‘em in, play some music you can work to without getting the urge to dance around the room, and get some serious work done. It’s a deterrent; there have been times when someone opened the office door thinking they had something important enough to say that it warranted interruption, noticed the headphones and reconsidered the importance of said statement. They close the door and go away. I don’t think they know my peripheral vision extends to the door.

3. Get a Webcam

I don’t think I’d ever actually use my webcam for professional communication, or in all honesty for any purpose at all, but shortly after buying an iMac, I made a quip about being able to do work-related videoconferences with it.

That alone seemed to reduce the daily interruptions. This effect could well be all in my head, but if you’re not as uncomfortable with a bit of a white lie as I am, perhaps you could tell your family you’ll be doing video conferences throughout most workdays. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t be interrupting you anymore.

4. Ban Housework During the Day

This harks back to something I mentioned in my first tip. Sometimes, spouses, roommates, or what have you will strangely demand that you take out the trash, do the dishes, clean out the shower or climb up and get leaves out of the gutters at the oddest and most inopportune of times.

Now, I have no problem with doing housework—don’t think that I’m just trying to get out of it here—but domestic life and work life need to be separate, right? That’s the whole point of this article. Make it a rule that you won’t do housework during the day, just as you wouldn’t call your spouse or housemates when they’re at work and ask them to come home for ten minutes to tidy up. Tell them you’ll do housework after real work and they should only ask you at that point.

There are no hard and fast rules unless you make them, though, so if taking the trash out while you’re on a break gives you a chance to wander outside, go for it—but at your own bidding.

5. Get Out!

Adding this to the list could be considered cheating, but there are just some days when you will not and cannot have a distraction-free office. You might have a teething toddler in the house and, even with your door closed and headphones on, you can hear the poor kid screaming in a combination of pain and exhaustion in the other room. The only solution to preserving the sacred distraction-free status of your workplace might be to shift it to somewhere else.

Don’t be afraid to get up and go elsewhere to work when you need to; what’s the point of working from home if you don’t let yourself do that sort of spontaneous thing anyway? When you’re out and about the only thing you have to worry about is the pesky barista who keeps telling you you’ll have to leave if you don’t buy a fifth coffee!

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

Need Creative Help? Try These Online Resources

When you start a small business, you need to advertise, brand and create business materials. Many people do this on their own, but often it is best to hire creative professionals to assist with these tasks.

Graphic artists, writers, software professionals and technical experts can be of great use to you in the beginning phases of operation. However, you may not want to hire them on as a permanent employee.

There are many places where you can find creative professionals to help you temporarily.

Web Forums

Forums are a great resource for finding creative professionals to help you with your small business.

Often forums have a section in which you can buy, sell or trade services with creative professionals.

These forums are often crawling with individuals who freelance and are looking for work.

Hiring Sites

There are a number of sites online like Guru.com that allow businesses to connect with creative professionals looking for work.

These sites allow you to place want ads and browse professional profiles and portfolios. They also help facilitate a smooth transaction with easy-to-use user tools and feedback.

Free Classifieds

There are a number of websites online that allow you to place free classified ads on their site. This allows you to place a help wanted ad when you are looking for creative professionals.

Just keep in mind you may get flooded with responses using this method - so it is wise to give yourself adequate time to go through them all.

Hiring a creative professional to help you with your small business can be tricky. It is important that you see samples of their work before hiring them and see feedback or review references.

The most important thing is that you protect yourself and your small business by using a careful hiring process.

Original post by Buzz

If you’ve been freelancing for a while, you probably already know that you often have to juggle several projects at a time. That’s not to say that you necessarily have to multi-task, but simply need to manage overlapping task schedules. The more successful your freelance career is, the more likely it is that you’ll have to manage multiple tasks simulaneously. They might be part of a single big project or parts of several smaller projects.

While you might consider learning some PM (Project Management) principles, in my experience, those are more suited to managing tasks of large corporate projects. While a PM approach can help freelancers, I’ve recently found a relatively simply way to predict and track my freelance workload, regardless of the number of clients I’m currently working with. The process uses a mind map to form a work grid, which can be used in tandem with a spreadsheet to track billables. The result is a relatively simple visual way to manage your freelance projects, which beats using just a spreadsheet.

Notes

Here are some notes to keep in mind when considering the process in this article:

1. The example used in this article uses freelance writing tasks, but the process can be applied to any type of freelance work.
2. The example uses MindJet MindManager Pro. You can get a free, fully functioning trial for Mac (21 days) or Windows (30 days). The reason I’ve used MindManager is that it has a horizontally-oriented “org chart” mode that makes setting up a task grid a lot simpler. If you prefer to use something else, you can approach this from a less-visually appealing vertical mode using any other mind mapping software (FreeMind - multi-platform - or the web-based Mindomo, Mindmeister, or Comapping applications). Note that some of the web-based apps have trial periods for advanced features.
3. If you do not want to use mind mapping software, you could either draw out your work grid or use a diagramming tool (MS Visio, SmartDraw, Gliffy).

The basic rule of thumb is to use whatever tool you feel most comfortable with.

The Process

Work Grid Setup
The general setup process is to produce a grid of days versus tasks. Using MindJet MindManager’s “organization chart” mode, I’ve produced the example mind map above. Here are the basic steps I applied:

1. Produce a row of “day” nodes.
2. Use node color and shape to distinguish “day” from “task” nodes. I’ve used a hexagon shape and a blue background to mark days. For tasks, I’ve used a “rounded rectangle” but different colors indicate the “value” of the task. Not all mind mapping packages offer this, but most offer a choice of node colors.
3. For each day, add a list of tasks that you hope to accomplish. Don’t worry about the order just yet. Make your task nodes distinct by “value. In my example:
• Green is a billable task.
• Orange is a task that leads up to billable work. E.g., scope or plan for a project.
• Salmon pink is research leading to another type of task.
4. For any project that cannot be completed in a single day, break it down into related tasks and assign one or more tasks to various days. (I usually mark only the final sub-task as being billable, because that includes delivery to the client.)
5. Give each task and project a short code, to keep the grid compact. Codes might repeat across the grid.
6. For a task that is actually billable, write the value in brackets. You can see in a zoomed in snapshot further down this article that I’ve only written in values for green task nodes. But for a given project, I might use 2-3 other task colors to indicate scoping, research or editing tasks. These tasks lead to billable activity but are not in themselves billable. How you break this up is entirely up to you. Small projects that can be completed all in one work session do not need to be broken down into multi-day tasks.
7. Use a spreadsheet to total up each day’s billables, based on your initial breakdown. MindJet allows insertion of their own spreadsheets or a “window” to an Excel spreadsheet, so that’s what I’ve used in this example (see somewhere below). You could also use Open Office or Google Spreadsheets.

This grid view allows you to easily adjust your schedule so that you’re not slacking one day and sweating the next. Remember to adjust your billables spreadsheet accordingly.

Here is another view, below, of the same work grid, with some of the mind map lines removed, and manually-added relationship lines (dotted) between groups of related tasks. (This makes moving items around much easier to track.)

Work Grid Usage
At the start of your work day, try to estimate how much time it’ll take you to complete scheduled tasks. Even if you don’t think you’ll make them all, leave the tasks where they are.

Assess your work at the end of day:

1. Check off completed items. I prefer not to delete older tasks, so I simply hide them under a collapsed “day” node. It’s easier to track work this way, without having clutter.
2. Consider your work grid to be organic. If an item was not completed, move it the next appropriate day. If it’s a chain of related tasks, you’ll have to adjust the subsequent ones as necessary.
3. Adjust your billables spreadsheet to reflect the actual work you completed today and the estimated work for the future. I usually try to map out no more than 2-3 weeks at a time. As I complete a week and hide the work log nodes, I add another week.

Here is a closeup snapshot of a sample freelance work grid, complete with MindManager native spreadsheet fragment. I’ve used the value of $1 per billable task (in green) for the example.

Final Thoughts

This is merely a suggested method of managing your freelance projects using mind maps. I find that this mind mapped approach to be far more flexible than my old method of using just a spreadsheet and trying to predict what work I would complete. It was also harder to see what work had to be done on a given day and what work could slide a bit. This mind mapped-grid is far more robust.

This approach also makes it easier to gauge your productivity and progress. Just remember to adjust the task grid and billables spreadsheet as you complete each day. Did you slack off today? Easier to see that you need to work harder, when it’s right there in front of your face that you only earned $20 today.

Original post by FreelanceSwitch.com

How to Communicate Effectively With Your Employees

Learning how to effectively communicate with your employees may seem like a no brainer. However, many people make critical errors when relaying their expectations to their employees.

The fact is, your actions (or lack thereof) can have a direct impact on employee productivity. Using proper communication methods can help bridge the gap between you and your employees, thus making your business run more smoothly.

Proper Training

When you hire an employee, make sure they clearly understand the full details of the job you are hiring them for. Outline what software programs you use, your expectations of conduct and the actual tasks they will be expected to complete.

When you hire them, have a senior employee train them for their position. Never just throw them into the fire without showing them the ropes.

Have regular employee performance reviews. This gives you an opportunity to reward employees who are performing well in their given position. In addition, it gives you and your employees the opportunity to address any issues they may have regarding the job or their performance.

Open the Lines of Communication

Make sure you have an open door policy to answer employees’ questions, so they feel comfortable coming to you when they need something clarified.

Being a good leader involves being a good communicator. Most errors in the workplace are a direct result of improper communication between an employee and their boss. Make sure your employees have clear directions and feedback at all times.

When you take the time to communicate with your employees, errors and misunderstandings can easily be avoided.

Original post by Buzz

In this article, I’m going to talk about how you can hold yourself accountable on a wee