Answers to your Small Business questions – Small Business Show 120

The Small Business show, episode number 120 for Wednesday, May 24, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business Show. The show by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire. As far as I can tell, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in the San Francisco Bay area, I'm Shannon Jean. I can kind of tell that, too. I'm running around like crazy today. So it's always.

It's one of those days.

It's a hustle, man. It's a hustle. Yeah, but that's literally. Go ahead.

No, the hustle's a good thing, right?

I like the hustle. There's no doubt about it. I may kind of, you know, bitch and moan a little bit about it sometimes, but I do like it. And, you know, but I literally ran in here into the quote studio, and I have those quote fingers in there in our conference room plugged in real quick and. Okay, great.

Let's. Let's roll. So it's good. I ran in here today, too. It's just been. Yeah, it's. It's good, though. I feel like. Well, and. And it's not just being busy. It's being intelligently busy. Right?

Yeah, exactly.

Doing the right things, being productive about the right stuff, not wasting your time with. With the stuff you shouldn't be. Although obviously, we all find ourselves in those scenarios where it's like, oh, crap, this is a waste of time. You know, and then. And then you pull the rip cord and you get out and move on. Yeah, but that can be a difficult thing to do if you, you know, if you've got emotional investment in it. Yeah, but the concept of sunk costs is a good one.

Yeah, we've talked about that. Yeah, exactly. And speaking of wasting time, the thing I always like is when we get feedback on the show because then it makes me feel like, oh, this is really valuable.

We're doing something here.

Yeah, yeah. And we really started this to give back to the small business community and to talk about stuff that's worked for us and hasn't, and it's turned into something much bigger and got a lot of great people that come on the show. So when we get some feedback and some questions, which I think we're going to talk about today, it really makes it all worthwhile. So if you have questions, comments telling us how great we are, how we suck, send those to feedbackusinessshow Co. Or you can even go up to the Facebook support group at BusinessShow Co Facebook, and comment there. And we would be Glad to chime in. It would be good to hear from you guys. It would be great.

We have a couple of questions. Yeah, I think we'll get through two today based on what I know about you and me. The first comes from listener Jeremy. He says, I'm thinking of getting rid of the physical office in favor of each of us working from home and connecting remotely. Currently there are four of us in my business, but this will grow. We already use Slack to communicate with other offices in the business, so that will help with internal communications. And collaboration on documents can be done through iWork or Google Docs. But my question is, what's your advice for the best way to replace our shared drive with a cloud solution? Essentially, we all need to work and save and store files to the same repository, accessible to all and ideally at the same time. Is Dropbox appropriate? You guys? On macgeek Gab, which is another podcast, I do refer to the Synology disk stations a lot. I've also heard about personal cloud solutions such as the Late and Great Transporter or what do you think? So, you know, my, my feeling on this is you're going to need, regardless of what you choose for your own business, you're going to need a Dropbox account. Because at some point, yeah, someone is going to be using Dropbox to share files with you or you're going to want to share files with somebody. And Dropbox is mostly ubiquitous these days. If you say to someone, I'm going to send you a Dropbox link and they don't have it, that, that can be. It's fair to say that's their fault. Right? You can go get a free Dropbox account really easily. Have Dropbox. Now, as far as using it for your business, you know, here at Backbeam Media and Mac observer, we actually use a combination of Google Docs, Google Drive and Dropbox. Now, part of the reason for it being spread around like that is because these things happened over time. We didn't start our business yesterday, Right. And so Dropbox was the first thing, and then, you know, and then it kind of came around. But if I were to start all over again, I might choose Synology's Cloud Station instead of Dropbox or Google Drive.

Okay. And so before we talk about Synology, let me comment on your setup. And I agree. And we use the same thing. And my take on it is similar, yet different. Dropbox is fantastic and it's great to use to quickly share files that are going to sync across all your devices. And it's very easy. What I don't like about it is. Well, compared to Google Docs, the collaboration within documents I don't think is nearly as polished. I don't like it because it's often saving different versions and doing different things and reminding you to do this and who's got it and who saved it. Who's the last one to edit? With Google Docs and Google Drive, which is what we use as well, it just works and you can see who edit, who's editing. You can see it in real time. You know, your, the comment system is fantastic that, you know, if you turn on editing and track editing, it's, it's great. So I, I really like that combination. You know, using Dropbox for file storage and then, you know, Drive obviously is part of, you know, the Google Docs and everything. But using those two in collaboration I think is a great way to go.

Yeah, it works. And yeah, Google Drive being able to actively work on the same document together is huge.

It is huge.

It's huge. And you're right, you can do that with icloud now, but you're relying on somebody else's cloud to do it, which also means you're relying on somebody else's cloud to store your files. And at some point you might hit the limit of free. Right? Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, that's fine. You know, you're running a business, hopefully you're making a little money and you can afford to spend a little bit of that on, you know, on some extra storage. The nice part about it is it's, you know, the nice part about using someone else's cloud like Dropbox or Google is they take care of making sure it's backed up. You know, if you have some problem in your office, that data is still there. Presum they haven't really, that I've heard of. They haven't had any major data loss outages or anything. I mean, they'd be out of business if they did. That's like the one thing they do. Yeah, that's right.

And I think there are some challenges too, especially if you start doing any kind of restructuring or people leave. It needs to become part of your process. Just like if, let's say someone leaves your company and they've got a key to the building or a card key, you know how you need to get that stuff back at your exit interview. Yeah, part of the process now needs to be we need to remove those people from the shared files. And what I've seen is that people, it's easy to forget that. So you need to go. Make sure you go up in Dropbox on occasion and check out what those permissions are and who's accessing what and who you've given permission to allow other people to access to. Especially if. Yeah, and it can get kind of sticky. I mean, we have all kinds. We have Dropbox everywhere and there's a lot of stuff going on and it's kind of like Slack with the private channels. You know, once you set them up, you're like, okay, I don't know who's in this channel or whatever, but you need to keep an eye on it. I think it's real important to make it part of your exit. Exit interview. So let's talk about the cloud station.

Yeah, well, yeah, so what we've been talking about here so far is public cloud, right? Someone else is managing the cloud for you. And again, there's benefits to that, there's cost to that. One of the costs is not financial. It is in terms of your privacy. Your data is living on someone else's servers. So in theory, someone else could get to that data. Certainly someone with a subpoena could get to that data. Now, hopefully you're doing anything in your business that requires that, but we're not here to judge. So because of that, I always stop and look at the private cloud solutions and yes, I am a big fan of, of Synology with what they call their disk stations, which is a network attached storage device. You put a bunch of hard drives in and it plugs into Ethernet and power, right? And it sits out there on your network and stores your files. So you can, you know, mount it on your, on your Mac or your PC and save files to and from it. So you get that level of interaction and that sort of, you know, file server type paradigm. But it goes much further than that because in order to sit on your network with a bunch of drives with an Ethernet port and power, it also needs to have a CPU inside it. And with that you can do a lot of things. And Synology has really kind of capitalized on this. So they have something called Cloud Station that runs on the server, on the network attached storage device, and then you run a client on your Mac that is just like the Dropbox client, except better. It really is better in every way. But it works the same way. You assign a folder or multiple folders to sync with the same folders on your cloud station. And of course, multiple people can do this and you can be in the same building as the cloud station and on the same network, or you can do it remotely, it just works. And now you're not paying Dropbox for storage. Of course you're paying for the disk station, you're paying for the drives that go in it. So you're still paying for storage. I don't want anyone to think you know, but you own it. And yes, if you have multiple locations, you could have two disk stations backing up to each other or syncing with each other so that you've got some fault tolerance beyond just the fact that you have multiple drives that are all fault tolerant within it. So that's where to me that's kind of the introduction to the, the synology. But it goes further than that. They have all kinds of other apps that can run on it, including a chat app that looks and acts a lot like Slack Office app that looks and acts a lot like Google Docs and Google Sheets. You know, so you've got your spreadsheets and your documents and it's all interactive and again it's all running on your own server. And you can go again further than that. You could run a calendar server on it, you could run your contact server, you can run a web server on it.

So if, if, if, like you for the non technical setting up Google Docs and Dropbox stuff, pretty straightforward setting this kind of thing up. Do you have to get some help with that? If you're not, I mean like you have to open ports on your router. How does that work?

Ports need to be opened on your router. The disk station is generally capable of doing that itself. Okay. So I would say that the level of knowledge, the minimum level of knowledge required would be intermediate to use this.

Okay.

If you, if you are intermediate and you get one of these within six months, you will be advanced.

Well, whether you want to or not.

Yeah. Just because you're going to, you're going to, you know, it's, there's many layers to the onion, you know, there's hundreds of apps available for these things. So you're, as soon as you get sort of the foot in the door, the killer app, the one thing that, whatever that is for you, you're just going to dig deeper and deeper and deeper. That's great. Yeah. Which is great, right? It's excitement will make you an expert, not frustration.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So yeah, that's a couple. You know, I like the different solutions, you know, quick and easy get up and running today, virtually no cost. But if you need something a little more sophisticated and you're concerned about privacy and scalability with different, you know, Apps and things that the synology sounds like something definitely look into.

It's a. Yeah. And it can be a lot of fun and it can. It can get a lot done. I mean, again, again, there's like a zillion different things. They have an entire surveillance package that you can have all your IP cameras linked to and it stores your footage and you can scroll through it and see it from anywhere. I mean, you know, it's just whatever you want. Pretty much. Yeah.

That's very cool.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

Awesome. Yeah, I like it. I like it.

So there you go. I hope that that might actually provide you with fodder for more questions, Jeremy. But that's okay. We're here.

Yeah, absolutely. And so we also heard some. Todd, regarding hiring a web developer versus bringing someone on as a partner that has some web development or IT background. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Todd writes, he says, I'm hoping you will cover how or if one should work with a freelancer or bring on a developer as a partner or an employee. I'm bootstrapping this website idea, so hiring one for salary is out of the question. To give you some context, I know nothing about programming and I'm not sure how much maintenance or upgrades the website will need. I don't even know how much it will cost yet. Is it. It is a review site for a specific industry where people can both rate companies and. Or look them up to see their rating and comments about them and then ultimately connect with them via clicks or phones or whatever. He says, think glassdoor for a specific industry.

That's cool.

Yeah. Monetization will come from referral fees and, and possibly advertising too. So.

Yeah, and, you know, that's a. It's a great question. And I think that. And I think I replied to an email back to Todd as well. My comment was, you know, if you're building, if you're. If your business is not specifically built around a web service, you know, if you're in E commerce or, you know, you're doing something else, you're an event planner and you need to have your website up and running, that kind of stuff. That stuff's pretty. I don't want to say easy. Well, I guess it's kind of easy. I mean. Well, there's certainly many choices to choose freelancers for that kind of. But my take on it was, Todd, if your whole business is built around this website, and that's the main point of interaction for all your customers, I'm not sure the freelance is the way to Go. Because I think your comment about maintenance and upgrades, my answer is lots. Because you're going to want to be introducing changes all the time, I would imagine. I don't know what specific or how you do it, but I would think I would be looking for someone to partner with that had that ability or at least those connections to handle that programming. That'd be my take on it. How about you, Dave?

Well, I mean, it's sort of hard for me to say because I have, I show up with the technical ability, but I'm not a web designer. Right. So.

Well, they're two different, Those are usually two different animals, right?

They are often. They often are. Right. It's actually if you can find somebody that has, you know, deep technical knowledge and is also a great designer, you can be very efficient about moving forward. But, but, but again, those people tend to fetch a pretty decent price because they have this perfectly matched skill set. But they are two different skills. But you know, you, you need.

And I think design, design is the easier one to find. There's more of them out there than the, than the back efficient back end person that's going to build the, you know, all the stuff and you know, everything to make this thing work. I think that one is, albeit maybe more important. But one point is all relative. It's got to, you know, look and function. The UI has got to be great. But you know, there's tons of design sites and freelancers because, you know, in my experience we would hire a designer, get a design built and then we would partner with the programmer. And that's a long process. I mean, our last site for Tech Restore, I mean we worked on it for a year before we went live with the thing.

And that was a year after you had the design kind of constructed or designed. Yeah, yeah.

So I think I interrupted you there. I didn't want to take on it.

I always have more trouble finding designers. But again, it's because I'm not looking for somebody to do the back end text stuff because I know how to do that. Although I will say for some projects where I simply don't have the time to be that person that takes the design and turns it into a working engine. I have hired and found pretty good people to do it. I used to use a company called Elance, which doesn't exist anymore or changed or sold something, but Guru.com took over for what they do. What you do is you go and post essentially a job listing, but you're finding freelancers not just locally but everywhere. And in fact, job rack.

Job rack.

Yeah. Which we talked about last week would be another place to look because, yes, you're gonna wind up. I've wound up more and more often for me, anytime I've farmed out work, it's always been to people that live in Russia. And there's a lot of benefit to that. But there are cultural differences that can be very frustrating.

Correct.

I joke, but it's only half jest that I say that. I don't think there's a Russian translation for the concept of quality control. I'm sure there is, but they see that. They prioritize that differently, at least the folks I've worked with, than I would. Right. But that's.

And I think my number one thing I tell people when you're outsource versus finding somebody here is getting the business concept across to them is often very difficult. They're very efficient at doing tasks and specific things, but when it comes to tying them all together to serve the concept and the purpose of your business, they're not often the ones that are going to grasp that and grok the whole thing and make it work together. So you can often have little pieces of things that can be a little challenging to bring together to happen even.

If you have someone in house. Right. But. But when you have someone in house, you get to have this sort of ongoing conversation.

That's right.

And. And you're not just saying, go do this and talk to me in, you know, a few days or a week or even sometimes a few weeks. Right. And then they come back like, oh, you misunderstood. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

You know, so you. If you do farm it out, I. I would say be. Spend a lot of time up front learning how to communicate with this person. I don't just mean if they happen to speak English as a second language because they live in, say, Russia. I mean, figure out how to truly communicate so that, like you said, Shannon, you're certain that the person that you're working with groks what you're telling them and fully understands it. And then you got to keep that dialogue going. And if they do misunderstand something which is going to happen with anyone, have that conversation and make sure you're talking about it. Like you said, from a business level in terms of this is. No, I don't worry about the very specific thing that you think I told you to build. Let's stop for one second and back up and think about what the goal.

Trying to do.

Yeah, we're trying to do.

Yeah.

And Invite their input, even though you might not take it by inviting their input, that that conversation actually deepens the understanding for everyone involved.

Yes. And you often, when you're outsourcing, in my experience, that's what you miss is you don't have somebody sitting with you going, hey, wait, there's a better way. You, when you outsource your especially going offshore, you're saying, hey, I need this, this, this, and this done. And they go, great, we can do this, this, this, and this. Well, when you have somebody sitting across from you, they can often say, well, we don't need to do those last two things if we do this first.

Right.

And that's a process and a concept knowledge.

I wouldn't necessarily say that outsourcing prohibits that. You just have to be more attentive to make sure that happens. Because the default path is we build what you told.

And you have to really be the communicator.

You have to. Yeah. Proactively.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, like I mentioned to Todd, you know, I would jump up, like, you know, go. Go online some forums or go up to Reddit, to the small business subreddit up there and, you know, start talking to some people. And, you know, there. I'm sure there are some IT folks out there that would be interested in talking with you about partnering or working together on something. At least that's a good place to start seeing if that's a good solution for you. Because even if you do outsource that, it's not cheap. You really do get what you pay for in many ways. You want to build a quality site, you're going to be working on it constantly and introducing new features and making sure things are going to work for.

What Todd's talking about. I would actually look for a partner that can. That can be that person, because you want to have that direction driven internally. Right. Driven from within. And if you don't have that from inside your company and you need to constantly, you know, contract with someone outside to do every little feature, you will be less likely to evolve your business at the rate that you probably need to, given that that is your product.

That's right. That's right. And I would try to find somebody, you know, with the programming chops, and you together can go out and hire a designer to build the user interface. You know what you want it to look like totally. But they can then plug those pieces in on the back end and do it that way. So I think that's the way to go in this case as well.

Totally. Totally. These are good questions. I like this stuff. Feedback at BusinessShow Co is is where you can find us, as Shannon said. Also BusinessShow Co Facebook at our small business support group. Or you can tweet us. BusinessShow Co it's all. Or it's business show co on Twitter. I always forget.

I think so.

Yeah. You'll find us out there. We put links everywhere. It's good stuff, folks. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks for. Thanks for your questions to Jeremy and Todd and everybody else that's gonna send in questions we look forward to hearing.

Gotta keep hustling everybody.

That's the only way to live the charmed life, man. You gotta. Gotta do the right work. Yeah. Don't look at.

Sit down.

Take care.