Operating a business in Quebec means sometimes having to write documents in both English and French.  Since most people are usually native speakers in only one language (in my case, English), writing in their second language can sometimes be problematic.  I usually have friends double check my French documents (e.g. emails) before sending them out.  However, this whole review process can be time consuming.

Enter a new feature from Google Docs.  At the click of a button, you can translate your text into your choice of 42 languages.  All have to do is select the text in your Google document, click ‘Translate Document’ and then select your language.

I haven’t tried all 42 languages, but I can definitely vouch for the English to French and French to English translators. I remember how not too long ago, the quality of online translators was extremely poor, sometimes even comical.  Since then, however, there has been some major improvements.

I still wouldn’t rely on this tool as my sole translator.  In other words, it is still necessary for a native speaker to proofread the translation.  However, it is much better than starting a translation from scratch. From my experience, It also reduces the time needed for proofreading by at least 50%.

A thumbs up once again to Google for thinking of another cool way to make our lives easier.

Keeping costs down in the first year or two of operations is crucial for any new start up.  Since new businesses typically have small revenue streams, they need to stay lean, especially in the first year or two of operations.  This is why having a ‘virtual office’ can go a long way in keeping administration costs down.  What do I mean by a virtual office?  It means essentially outsourcing all functions of an office from the phone number to the civic address to where you hold your business meetings.

Lets start with your business office.  In the beginning, most new startups operate their businesses from home.  It saves money and there are also numerous tax advantages (e.g expensing a portion of the monthly mortgage).   The problem with having a home office is that it is not very professional to meet potential clients in your living room or at your kitchen table.  Furthermore, for privacy reasons, not everyone is comfortable putting their civic address on their business card.  You can also imagine a client’s surprise after deciding to ‘drop by’ your office and finding themselves on a residential street filled with detached homes.

Enter companies like ExecuSpace and Global PrimeOffice Network.  The creative people behind these companies created a profitable business model by renting office space and conference rooms by the hour ($20 and $25 respectively at ExecuSpace).  They also ’sell’ business addresses in prime locations that you can use instead of your civic address.  At ExecuSpace for example, for $50 per month, you can put their business address (prime office space located in downtown Montreal) as your own business address.  They will keep all your mail for you and you can pick it up any time between regular business hours (9am to 5pm).  An add-on service would be to sign up for personalized telephone answering where a professional secretary can answer basic questions and forward calls to your business number (involves the monthly charge as well as  signing up for a regular business line).

Note:  An even cheaper alternative to a business address is to go to your nearest Canada Post office and sign up for a P.O. Box.  For $16 a month ($47 every three months), you can have your own P.O. Box and receive all your business related mail.

Now that a professional business location is taken care of, lets look at telephone service.  You can always use your house phone or cell phone to receive business calls.  However, what if your child answers the phone at home?  What if a personal friend calls your cellphone and the first thing they hear is is “XYZ Inc., John speaking. How may I help you?”.  There are clearly some disadvantages to mixing your personal life with your professional life.  Lets look at the alternative.  A basic business line with a carrier like Bell or Videotron will cost you at least $70 per month (doesn’t include long distance plan).  This is manageable, but what if I told you that there was a way to get your own business number and unlimited local and long distance calls anywhere in Canada and the US for about $10 per month?

Some of you may have heard of Skype In, a feature of Skype that allows users to get a local number and receive the call online on your Skype account. The problem is that in Canada, this service is not available.  There is a way to get around this restriction.  JetNumbers is an international company that provides local numbers to users for a low rate of $5.95 per month.  It works like any normal number except that when people call the number, the call is automatically forwarded to your Skype account.  As I mentioned, most owners of a new businesses usually work from home so this feature can be very convenient.  If you are away from your computer, you can send JetNumber a professionally sounding personal greeting that they can add to your voicemail.  If that’s not enough, all new voicemails are recorded and sent automatically to an email address of your choice in wav format.  Too good to be true?  Wait, there’s more…

Skype has a long distance plan where you can make unlimited calls to the Canada and & US for $2.95 a month.  I’ve already used this service, and the quality is excellent.  So lets do the math.  When you sign up for this plan in addition to JetNumbers, you have unlimited incoming calls to your business number and unlimited outgoing calls to Canada and the US for less than $10 per month.  Now that’s a deal!

Obviously, when you start generating revenues on a consistent basis, you can opt for a regular office with its own business line, etc.  In the mean time, consider using some of the services above.  Don’t forget that being a startup does not excuse you from having a poor professional image.  For a new business with no established brand in the marketplace, this can be a crucial factor.  Don’t hurt your chances of securing a new client by having a meeting at your kitchen table or having your 5 year old answer the phone call of a prospect.  You can stay lean while having a professional image at the same time.

At the last networking event for Edge Networking, we invited Patrick Depriest, an Internet marketing specialist to give a presentation on search engine optimization. The full audio presentation will be available shortly on our website.  In the mean time, here is a summary of the key points he presented.

There are 5 key factors that determine how well a site is ranked on Google:

Domain name:  I remember when I first registered my domain name (tanveeramin.com).  I felt like I was on top of the world.  I had my own ‘footprint’ on the World Wide Web.  I was even happier when I searched my name on Google a few months later and my site appeared on the first page of search results.  Now, I was really in business!  The problem is that aside from soothing one’s ego, it does little to generate traffic.  Aside from my circle of contacts, few people will search for “Tanveer Amin” on the web.  If my objective is to rank high on Google for people searching for articles on entrepreneurship, it is much better to register a domain name like “www.entrepreneurshipresourceguide.ca”.  Be sure not to use any hyphens in your domain (a big no-no).

Some might object to using such a long domain name, but most people will find you by searching for keywords in Google, not by typing your URL.  To determine which search terms are popular, you can use free research tools like Google Keyword Tool and Google Trends’.  You can even refine searches geographically.

Another option (which is the one I will soon adopt for my blog) is to keep the original domain name and register a second more SEO friendly domain, which will be the ‘landing page’. When people enter a search term in Google, the landing page will appear.  Once at the site, if they click anywhere on the page, they will be re-directed to your original site.  This way, you get to keep the original domain name while generating more traffic from the landing page.  However, if you are going to use this method, be sure to do a permanent 301 re-direct when someone clicks on a link on your landing page (your web guy will know what that means).

Age of domain:  Search engines tend to like domains that have been around for a while.  They are considered more ‘trustworthy’.  You can search for aged domains on canreg.com.  If you can’t find an aged domain, don’t stress too much.  Follow the rest of the recommendations and you’ll be fine.

Coding errors:  Search engines will spend less than a second ‘reading’ your site.  If there are too many coding errors, it slows them down and they eventually stop trying.  You can use a free tool called W3C Validator to check the number of coding errors on your site.

Content:  Be sure to put relevant content on your site and update it regularly.  If you can’t add new content everyday, do it once a week or once every two weeks.  However, the key is consistency.  Adding relevant content every second Sunday is much better than adding new content for 5 days straight and then nothing for the month after.  Here’s another tip:  upload the content at the exact same time every interval (e.g. every Sunday at 12pm).  Believe it or not, after a few times, Google becomes aware that you upload new content every Sunday and visits your site more frequently during those times.

One warning with respect to content.  Some ‘smart’ programmers will often try to trick Google by hiding keywords on their various pages (e.g. they will change the font to white and paste the keywords hundreds or thousands of times across the screen).  This might work in the short run, but will fail miserably in the long run.  And remember:  once you get caught by Google doing something sneaky (e.g. hiding keywords, link farms, etc.), they might permanently put you on their ‘ignore list’.  From that point on, you can forget about optimizing your website since it no longer exists for Google.

Links:  The greater the number of sites that link to your site, the higher it will be ranked.  However, be careful not to use ‘link farms’, which is another sneaky trick Google dislikes.  A link farm is any group of sites that all hyperlink to one another for the purpose of increasing web ranking on search engines.  Links must be genuine.  For example, you can ask a company that sells gym memberships to link to your site that sells sports accessories.  Link submissions can be very time consuming and it’s something that you can outsource to companies like the one where Patrick works ( SEO Internet Marketing).  Over the course of several months, they will strategically post link submissions to increase traffic to your website.

The key think to remember, as Patrick pointed to me after his presentation, is that there are no secrets to search engine optimization.  There are also no shortcuts.  Do it right and get it right the first time.  It will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

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I was out of action the last 3 days.  No posts on my blog.  No working on my business plan.  No sleep until 3 or 4 in the morning.  All this stress because of a trojan (malicious software) I accidentally downloaded called ‘Virtumonde’.  It absolutely crippled my computer.  Although I had a backup of all my important files, they weren’t the latest versions.   I was also afraid of losing all my emails in the past year, which I neglected to backup.

Thanks to a lot of perseverance and a few helpful pointers from the friendly people at the Mozilla online forum, I was able to fix the problem and recover all of my files and emails.  As I’m breathing a lot easier now, I’ve had the chance to reflect on the last few days.  Here are some hard lessons I learned thanks to my ordeal:

1.  Always have a backup (preferably two) of all your important files.  Having just one can be risky (picture a fire in your home or office; there goes your computer along with your external hard drive (i.e. the backup) in your cabinet).   If you insist on having just one, don’t keep it in the same location as the original source.  I use an external hard drive as my first backup.  I also recommend you use an encryption software like TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org) to add another layer of protection.   My second backup is Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/), an online storage service by Amazon.  Some of their great features include:  no monthly fees or commitments, full encryption, automatic backups, and a great rate of 15 cents per gigabyte stored.

2.  There’s beauty in simplicity.  Afraid of losing all my ‘precious’ files, I went through all of my folders to make sure everything was intact.  This search made me realize that many of these files were in fact, not that ‘precious’ (e.g. audiobook of Aesop’s fables, e-books on how to master AutoCad, etc.)  I got rid of these unnecessary files and reduced/re-organized all my folders.  One of my favorite things to do is getting rid of clutter, both in my physical environment as well as inside my computer.  I find it clears and sharpens my thinking.  I was reading an article on Bruce Lee a few weeks back and he had a beautiful quote on the topic.  He said:

“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease.  Hack away at the unessential.”

This applies in the business realm as well.  Can you explain what your business does in a single sentence?  What about in a single word?  What are the essential and inessential parts?  Who are your key customers and who are the ones you can do without?  What is your key product or service?  How are you spending your time?  Are you just keeping yourself busy most of the day doing things that are urgent but really unimportant in the long run?  When I started researching my business idea of launching a language training institute for the corporate sector, I spent a lot of time keeping myself busy.  I tried to meet anyone and everyone.  I tried to read anything and everything.  I was getting things done, but I had no central focus.  The constant activity made me feel good about myself though in reality, I wasn’t making progress.  I now do my best to start every day by writing down a few things I want to accomplish that are essential and important.  It might take me a mere half hour to complete these tasks, but at the end of the day, I feel like I made progress and moved forward.  Simplify, reduce, eliminate.

3.  Harness the power of OpenSource software.  For those unfamiliar with tech lingo, the term essentially refers to free programs created through the joint efforts of programmers worldwide.  Startups should give some serious thought to open source since they can save a lot of money in licensing costs (I wouldn’t recommend having ‘free’ pirated software installed in your workstations).  So instead of spending a few hundred dollars on Windows, consider using Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com), a Linux based operating system.  Instead of Microsoft Office, you can use Open Office (www.openoffice.org) which has an equivalent to Word, Excel, Power Point, and Access and is also compatible with the Office suite.  Instead of Internet Explorer, use Firefox (www.mozilla.com/firefox).  Instead of Microsoft Outlook, use Thunderbird (www.mozilla.com/thunderbird).  There’s even open source for CRM software (customer relationship management) called VTiger (www.vtiger.com), a free version of SalesForce.com.  The one drawback of open source is that technical support is restricted to online forums.  However, if needed, you can pay a little extra for technical support for you and your staff.

4.  This brings me to my last and most important lesson, and that is to NEVER put your complete trust in technology.  When I was young, I bought myself a small electronic organizer.  After using it for about a year, I grew very attached to this small device.  Imagine my shock when both the primary and backup batteries died at the same time, erasing all of my contacts.  I was so upset that I decided never to use ‘fancy’ technology ever again.  Of course, I soon realized that my blind trust in technology was more to blame than anything else.  Also, the truth is, I was never really attached to the electronic organizer itself.  The emotional attachment came from what was inside the organizer (i.e. all of my personal and professional contact information, birthdays, notes, etc.).

Machines can and will break down.  How is your business taking this into account in day to day planning?  For instance, I am trying to launch a language training institute targeting the corporate sector.  Naturally, we will be using things like a laptop, projector, etc. to deliver presentations.  However, on any given day, any or all these things can malfunction.  Yet, this breakdown does not alleviate our responsibility to offer a superior product to our customer.  This can be done without Power Point slides, without fancy multimedia, etc.  Obviously, this is not always possible for all businesses, but the key point to remember is to have contingency plans in case of a breakdown in technology.

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