Business?

Hond FCX Clarity

Honda is currently trialing what seems to be the most promising zero (environmentally damaging) emission vehicle to date, the FCX clarity.

The clarity runs completely on hydrogen gas.  The gas is then used in a fuel cell with oxygen to produce electricity which is then stored in a Lithium Ion battery (kinda like the ones out of your laptop).  This stored energy is then used to run a electric motor.  The use of the hydrogen fuel cell to produce electricity means the the car emits only water vapor.  Unfortunately, the Clarity is only available as a trial in Southern California.

I’m a bit of a technology and environment buff, so i’ve been waiting for somebody to develop this vehicle since i first read about the possibility of hydrogen becoming a viable fuel.  I’m very much looking forward to trying out this vehicle (or something like it) in the near future.

While the Clarity is an exciting new vehicle,  the core technology of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell will have massive applications in terms of a clean way to generate power.  Eventually we will have no more conventional internal combustion engines emitting a gamut of toxins and noise pollution into our communities.

A simple example of a commercial application of this technology would be a clean, reliable backup power generation that businesses or individuals could have in their premises and use without getting suffocated by carbon monoxide.

Hydrogen fuel could be used to run a commercial power station, but given that you can’t just dig hydrogen out of the ground like coal or uranium it would make electricity lot more expensive for the end consumer.  Currently in Southern California where the Clarity is undergoing it’s trial, the hydrogen is roughly the same price as unleaded fuel.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell technology is still in its infancy, but as more people get interested in this technology and use it when it becomes available more resources will be put forward to develop the technology further.   In terms of environmental advantages of Hydrogen technology, it is invaluable for us to adopt it as early as we can to remove high emission vehicles from general society and industry.

I’ve just focused on the environmental advantages of Hydrogen power in this article, but there are other more practical advantages as well, such as low machine maintenance costs (there’s fewer moving parts in an electric engine, thus less to go wrong) and eventually lower development costs.

Bring on the hydrogen powered stuff.  I’m looking forward to going to cities, sans smog.

I was chatting to one of my friends yesterday about his 30 year business career. During the course of this conversation one statement in particular he made  stuck in my mind.

“I don’t have failures, just setbacks”.

In my opinion this is a counter productive way to think. Everybody fails at something at one stage of their lives. Failure is a part of learning. It’s a part of life.

A setback, however, is when you lose time due to unforeseen circumstances. A setback is a hiccup; an annoyance that gets in your way on your journey to your goal.

Let’s put it this way, would something that you choose to view as a minor setback stick in your mind as a life lesson, or would something that you view as a complete cock-up be more prevalent as a life lesson? I’m betting the latter would be true for most people.

A failure is a failure.  If you have a goal and you don’t achieve it, you’ve failed.  It shouldn’t be viewed as a  setback, a minor inconvenience or an opportunity to blame others for what went wrong.  Accept the failure, learn from it and if you can swallow your pride, educate others on how to avoid making the same mistake.

Nikesh Arora, President of EMEA Operations speaks about how the internet is changing marketing at the Marketing Society Annual Conference in London.

This video is about a year old now, but it is still worth watching if you have any interest at all in marketing.

Globally, many people are losing their jobs due to the economic downturn. Some friends of mine have become victims of this.

It is very easy to get angry and bitter at your (previous) employer if you lose your job. And understandably so; after all, you put a lot of time and effort into your work and now you have nowhere to go and more poignantly, no more regular income.

What you have to remember is that it’s not personal.  You weren’t fired because your boss / supervisor / employer doesn’t like you or that you do a particularly bad job.  The company or business that you work for has to be focused on keeping its collective head above water.  In a recessionary environment that means keeping a close eye on the overall cost ratio to revenue.

Put it this way,  if your companies’ sales were dropping and they couldn’t afford to keep you and 3 other staff on, does it makes sense to keep you 4 people on even though it may mean an eventual company bankruptcy?  In this case it wouldn’t be 4 people losing a job, it could be everybody in your company.

If redundancy does happen to you, make sure you try leave the company with dignity and respect and not a tirade of abuse and promises of vengeance.  Don’t burn your bridges.  After all, you don’t know who will be hiring or recommending you for another great position in the future.

In the previous post I recommended hiring a good SEO company to help you promote your site on the search engines.

But what if you can’t afford the costs of a good SEO company?

You can do SEO yourself.  Quite easily.  It just takes a bit of time and patience to learn.  There are many good resources and communities on the Internet that will point you in the right direction in regards to SEO.  Listed below are 3 resources that i have found very useful:

• SEO Made easy - Free SEO e-book.  This e-book will give you a good idea on how you should start your SEO strategy.  Download the book from http://www.homebiz-direct.com/SEO-made-easy.html
• http://www.seochat.com - This is a one stop shop for SEO tools and knowledge, a hub where SEO mavens impart their knowledge to the world.  I find the forum particularly useful (http://forums.seochat.com).  Post any SEO questions you have in their forum and you can be assured that it will be answered reasonably quickly by one or more current SEO practitioners.
• The ultimate SEO checklist (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/ultimate-seo-checklist) .  This may be a bit dated now, but its still provides a good, simple starting guide for burgeoning SEO enthusiasts.

At this point i must offer a caveat: I am no SEO expert.  But using the 3 resources listed above, i was able to get my company sites front page rankings on both Google and Yahoo for the key phrases we had chosen.

Please be aware if you are a beginner that positive SEO results aren’t instant and needs to be constantly worked at.  As you get more familiar with the SEO tricks and techniques, you will find it easier (that is, less time consuming) to achieve and maintain the ranking you want.

Another important point:  search engines change their search algorithms and processes every so often, so some of the information you read on SEO today may not necessarily apply a month or even a week down the track, so keeping updated with the latest SEO methods and techniques is a must.

If you have a small business with a website, it is well worth your money to hire a good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company to get your business in the face of more potential customers.

What is a good SEO company? How do you judge a good SEO company when what they offer you initially is an intangible product followed by one or more promises of a high Google ranking?

A good SEO company should offer you the following:

• A reasonable guarantee of all their services.  I say “reasonable” because nobody can guarantee a #1 ranking.  A first page or “Top 10″ ranking is a reasonable guarantee though.  If they don’t offer some sort guarantee, they are probably unsure if they can achieve the results.
• Frequent reports.  An analytical documented report on the effectiveness of the devised SEO strategy in regards to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN Live etc).  This report must be in writing, no dodgy over the phone status updates.
• Offer a decent amount of keywords to optimize for.  The more, the better.
• References to previous companies that they have provided their SEO services for.
• A service to monitor and analyze your competitors.  This is used to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors websites.  This knowledge is then used to strengthen your SEO strategy.

Don’t hire SEO companies that:

• Guarantee a #1 ranking.
• Say they have an exclusive partnership with search engines.   It’s a lie.
• Do not have a well optimized website of their own.  Ask them what keywords their own website ranks under and test it out.
• Are generally panned in SEO discussion and help forums.  If you have a SEO company in mind, Google them.  In the search engine results look for any forums containing the name of your proposed SEO company and read what people have to say about them.

It is also an advantage to hire a local, reputable SEO company if possible.  Building a good rapport and understanding with the people promoting you website can’t hurt.  And you have somewhere to go if something goes wrong with your SEO strategy.

Most SEO companies I’ve seen require a setup fee as well as a monthly SEO maintenance fee.  It is easy to look at this before you hire a SEO company and think “Its too much and i can’t justify the cost”.  The fact to remember in this case is that SEO, as well as any other type of marketing, should be seen as an investment, not a cost.

The Internet is the largest marketing medium around today and unless you can be found via search engines, its not going to be much use to you; the benefits to you of having a business website become extraneous.

Joel Spolsky has a great article on one of the worst mistakes a software developer can make:  Deciding to rewrite a piece of software from scratch.

I am referring to this article because 2 years ago i made this very mistake myself.  It was only after the point of no return did i realize that i had made a massive mistake.  A massive, expensive and time consuming mistake.

The software i was rewriting was a custom built real estate CRM system.  When i was first hired as the developer I looked through the existing code and i couldn’t understand much of what it did, even though this was my professional area.  It wasn’t because i was inept at my profession, it was because of the fact, as Joel Spolsky accurately puts it:

“It’s harder to read code than to write it.”

This a rule of programming often forgotten, and actually thinking back to my university days, I can’t remember a single occasion where it was mentioned in any lecture or tutorial.  The teaching staff there probably forgot about it.

In my ignorance of this little fact at the time, I had managed to persuade my employer; a man who had spent over $300,000 on the existing system over the 7 years preceding to my employment; to throw his existing software away and let me start again because i could “do it better”.  And I did make the system much better.  It had more relevant functions, was faster, more efficient and very easy to maintain.  But in taking the complete re-development path I wasted so much time and money completely re-developing a piece of software that already existed; a piece of software that had worked for years and a piece of software if I had been bothered to comprehensively understand would have taken a third of the time and budget to upgrade rather than re-create.  Regardless from which angle I chose to look at it, re-building the entire software was a colossal mistake.

If you own a small business and you hire a new developer and they try to convince you to throw away your old, working system / software  (even if it’s only partially working), don’t let them do it! It is the equivalent of throwing the bulk of the money and time you have spent on the existing system into the toilet.  Chances are you originally hired that new developer to maintain and continue your computer system or software, not re-build it.

If you and/or your business are technically minded, are thinking about hiring developers or already developing your own software, i highly recommend Joel Spolski’s blog as a good  source of information and direction.

And actually listen to them!

I have been employed at places that have spent exorbitant amounts of time and money to hire intelligent and experienced professionals to do a job which, in my view, was beneath them.

But they were offered a high salary, so most of them came aboard.

After a little while at the company, almost all of these people; these brilliant, expensive employees, left the company.  They left because the job satisfaction wasn’t there.  The decision makers that employed them didn’t want to listen to their innovative new ideas, or suggestions on how they could improve a process or service.  After all, why change what’s working?

What a waste of good employees.  More poignantly, what a waste of potentially great contributors.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to hiring professionals.  If you own a restaurant, and one of your wait staff have an idea, do you evaluate their idea as a valid contribution from an individual that works in the industry, or do you view their suggestion as worthless because “they are just wait staff”.

Micheal Dell, Founder of dell computers and a man worth about $17 Billion, was a dishwasher at one stage of his life.  A smart guy by anyone’s standards.  How do you know somebody like this, somebody that may have something of extreme value to contribute, doesn’t already work for you?

If you have spent the time and money on hiring the right staff, why not listen to any ideas and comments they have on your business?  Why not encourage them to put forward their ideas and comments?   These are different people with different experiences, circumstances and points of view to you, chances are that they will see opportunities, faults and processes differently in your business.

Happy new years all!  We at YourStrategy.com.au hope that 2009 exceeds 2008 in your personal goals as well as business goals.

Also, as i found out just recently (as in 2 hours ago) drinking a large percentage of a bottle of 16 yr old scotch isn’t advisable, regardless of the occasion.

My boss brought up a good question today:

“Why do people hire commercial premises if they are going to open less than 7 days a week?”

This is a good point because all commercial premises only return as an investment if they are actually being used to conduct business, not when they are closed.  You pay the rent for 7 days a week, if you only operate 5 days a week there goes 2 days rent down the tubes.