From the Business Desk Archives

Maternity and Parental Leave II: Crafting a Leave Policy

February 16, 2016 by Michael Raymond

Last week I took a first stab at exploring how the arrival of Little Turtle impacts our business, and some of the thoughts we have to ensure both the continued success of Tinking Turtle as well as our own personal well-being through a maternity leave policy.

As mentioned before, while a policy or leave of any kind isn’t a federal requirement for most LYS’s and other fiberarts business there are many benefits. These can be realized by taking leave herself as well as providing a leave policy for employees. Some suggested benefits as compiled by the Small Business Administration (which calls providing this type of leave a “smart option” for small businesses) include: positive morale for the for the perspective parent and increased loyalty of all employees. The International Labour Organization goes further in a broad horizontal review of leave policies, and finds that providing a comprehensive and flexible level of leave across all ranges of organizations can lead to positive outcomes including improved worker performance, productivity, and satisfaction.

Implementation of a leave policy can vary differently whether or not you are a retail shop owner, or a provider of fiber arts services with a work-from-home schedule. According to allBusiness.com, one of the ways small business benefit by being exempt from federal regulations is the ability to tailor broader policies to meet the individual needs of the company’s employees. With the rise in teleworking, there can be a “tiered” approach to a policy, both as the child’s birth date approaches as well as for employees returning to work after leave. The only caveat here is that whatever policy is established, it needs to be applied consistently and fairly across all levels of employees. This ensures there is no risk of an employee filing a discrimination lawsuit due to favoritism. Having such a policy documented and provided to all employees (in a handbook or welcome packet) for businesses with multiple employees is a good way to ensure everyone is aware of the policy and is treated fairly.

Here’s our maternity leave schedule and policy!

When you have a single employee or are self employed (as in our situation), how to develop a policy means being comfortable with the business closing, taking a break, or going on vacation for a period of time. With multiple employees, managing the business can be a bit easier, however it very well may mean reduced hours or services depending on the size of the business and the role of the employee, manager, or owner taking leave.

When we began contemplating a maternity leave policy, with Jennifer the sole revenue generating employee, we knew it would involve a period of time where Tinking Turtle would need to suspend most business operations. While there are some basic administrative tasks that I can perform, I doubt I could stand up to the quality for designing or finishing that our customers expect!

After reviewing the economics in our annual budget for how much time we wanted to provide Jennifer, we developed a policy and schedule that afforded us the balance to allow for personal time with our new arrival as well as not lose business direction and momentum. For Tinking Turtle, this came to be a gradual reduction of duties preceding the due date, and then a stair-stepped approach with both taking leave immediately after Little Turtle’s birth and then gradually returning to a “new normal” after our determined leave time.

Once we set this policy for ourselves, our next tasks were to communicate this out to our customers and our business partners. I’ll write more on this aspect in my next post, as keeping everyone who interacts with your business in the loop is key to implementing a successful maternity or paternity leave policy for a small fiberarts business.

~ Mr. Turtle

Maternity and Parental Leave and Small Businesses

February 8, 2016 by Michael Raymond

Little Turtle!

Ah, Babies. What greater topic can evoke such an array of emotions from new parents and family & friends alike. In the business world however, babies and pregnancy are often met with a quiet sense of trepidation; just how will having a child affect an employee and their family? What does maternity or parental leave even mean?

As Jennifer mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we are blessed to be expecting a daughter of our own. This is an exciting time of change and discovery for us, as we start evaluating how having a child will affect both our personal lives as well as that of this business that we run, Tinking Turtle. A wide variety of opinions and ideas exist on how Silicon Valley tech-startups consider pregnancy and childbirth, however this culture significantly differs from the fiber-arts world. I figured I’d take a stab at documenting some of the items we are considering as we go throughout this process. This will be a journey of exciting new learning for all of us, so please join me as we work our way through the process of putting all of the pieces together to ensure we can have a warm and happy welcome for Little Turtle.

Under the defining legislation currently applied towards pregnancy and birth in the workplace, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, business with less than 50 employees are exempt from any requirements to provide maternity or parental leave, either paid or unpaid. Just because it’s not required, however, doesn’t mean that there are not benefits both to the business as well as the new mother. In a small one or two person shop, this is a difficult decision to make; it would involve essentially cutting back or shutting down operations for a period of time. With a large majority of LYS’s and other related businesses being owned and staffed by women, this is a doubly difficult consideration given the potential amount of time away to be considered.

Here at Tinking Turtle, we’ve begun exploring just how to balance these two competing factors: providing the time through maternity leave to nurture and welcome a Little Turtle into the family, while still being cognizant of the business landscape and relationships to maintain.

Check out our next installment, where I’ll drill down into some of the specifics on how we hope to accomplish this, and our thought process behind some of these decisions.

~ Mr. Turtle

From the Business Desk: Small Business Privacy

October 15, 2015 by Michael Raymond

From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This feature looks at some of the common privacy implications that Small Business owners should have an awareness of. Join Mr. Turtle as he looks into the practicalities of privacy and small business.

License: Some rights reserved by g4ll4is

Just the other week, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that in addition to the estimated 22.1 million identity records that had been compromised in an illicit hack of their databases, approximately 5.6 million sets of fingerprint records has been stolen as well. Unlike a credit card or social security number, which can be changed or re-released, this personal biometric data is crucial to keep private, something that the OPM had failed to do.

While most small businesses do not operate at the scale of the Federal Government, they are still responsible for certain privacy requirements around how customer and employee data is collected and used. In addition to the commonly thought of privacy items like securing data from theft, there are other more subtle aspects of privacy law that govern what a business can, and more importantly cannot, do with someone’s data. While privacy has been growing in importance with the rise of the Digital Age, it has only been recently that the general public has become attuned to it’s importance in the world of commerce. As a small business owner, having a baseline understanding of some of the key elements of privacy law can pay dividends in protecting your business and yourself from liability.

In the United States, unlike our European cousins, privacy regulations follow a sectoral approach: each sector of the economy has its’ own set of laws and regulations. The general enforcement for privacy constraints in the business sphere, as opposed to more regulated sectors of industry like healthcare and finance, is the Federal Trade Comission (FTC). In its’ creation with the Federal Trade Commission Act, the body is chartered with enforcing against “unfair and deceptive trade practices and acts,” of which case law has held includes taking appropriate privacy and security measures. For the small business owner, this is important in how you portray your business’s privacy practices to your customers and the general public.

One of the first items a business owner should consider is that if you have a web presence, you should have a written Privacy Policy. This serves to inform any visitors of their rights to their personal data, and more importantly, your intentions surrounding that data. This in turn allows users to make informed decisions or know that for instance using a “contact me” form on your website may lead to their email address being added to your mailing list. Additionally, the State of California in their 2003 Online Privacy Protection Act requires such a notice to be posted on the website if you may potentially be collecting identifiable information from California Citizens. Given the interconnected web of e-commerce in today’s world, the chances are that this may be happening; ensuring that you have developed a current and accurate document unique for your business situation can cover a lot of your privacy bases in this respect.

Attribution: Some rights reserved by hyku

Another key area a small business owner should be aware of is how they conduct any email communication and marketing. As e-mail messaging has exploded in recent years, replacing more traditional postage service mailings, many small business owners have found themselves afoul of the regulations in this space. Email messaging in the United States is primarily governed by the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM Act) of 2003. In brief, the Act requires all email messages to possess a legitimate return email address and physical address of the sender, not have any false, misleading, or deceptive headers or subjects, and provide a clear and conspicuous way for the recipient to opt out of receiving future email messages at no cost to them.

Because of requirements such as these, I would recommend that any organization that intends to use email as a platform for outreach to consider selecting an Email Marketing service to assist in managing one’s distribution list. Many of the commonly used services, such as Mad Mimi, MailChimp, or Constant Contact provide free or extremely cost effective basic plans for small business users. These services allow the use of email formatting templates to assist in meeting all necessary privacy requirements, and additionally provide a platform by which recipients can individually manage their subscription status and opt in or out of receiving certain types of communications. Additionally, such services assist in keeping email distribution lists secure, and ensure that when messages are sent out, recipients email addresses are not exposed to other individuals. It is because of these benefits that any small fiber arts business should consider setting up an Email Marketing service as part of their initial business plan.

While the future of privacy law and requirements for U.S. based businesses may seem murky, a small fiber arts business can take heed of the above principals to best position themselves to be able to respond both to industry requirements as well as the overarching desires of their customer base. By acting and thinking in the best interest of the customer, and treating customer information as you would have another company treat yours, the savvy business owner can create and maintain indispensable customer goodwill. And that is an asset always worth having for your business.

Michael Raymond, CIPP/US

“Mr. Turtle”

From The Business Desk: Agile for Small Businesses

September 25, 2015 by Michael Raymond

From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This feature looks at how to leverage some new time and project management techniques from the Agile framework for small businesses.

As a small business owner, time is one of the most important assets that you have. It is also one of the most limiting. While other business areas like staffing or inventory can be expanded or invested in, there are only so many hours in a day (if you know how to change this, please let me know!). Making effective use of your time for projects and operations is crucial for a well managed business to both succeed and grow.

Is this what agile means to you?

Scrum. Kanban. Sprint. Agile. You may have heard these phrases before in industry trade shows or in the media as the newest focus for tech companies to manage their time, projects, and resources. While originally created for Software Development, the Agile Framework at it’s core can be applied to any business process or project; especially in the Fiber Arts industry where there are natural market segments and discreet work items like classes, designs, and projects.

While we here have written previously about project management, thinking about the Agile methodology more surrounds the what rather than the how. The core elements of agile that a Small Business owner should most be aware of are Team Ownership of Work, Minimum Viable Product/Shippable Units, and Timeboxing.

Before diving into these a bit further, I wanted to provide a 30 second overview about Agile from a non-technical perspective. Unlike traditional mindsets where work is done in an orderly, sequence of events, Agile revolves around breaking up the necessary work to be done into discreet work units, and then over a set period of time (commonly called a “Sprint”) delivering a piece of the work to the customer. For example, if you are running an LYS the work could be a 4 week class on garment construction; each week/session could be a unique and discreet unit of work. Now, with this background, let’s look a bit further at some of the tenants that could be applied to your business:

Team Ownership of Work: Agile frameworks work best when a team of individuals with a variety of skills are empowered to come together to tackle a project or issue as a whole. The team, rather than one individual, collectively has a say in how the work is preformed and ultimately delivered to the customer. This is especially applicable to a Fiber Arts business, due to the muti-facted nature of the industry.

If you are looking to put on a specific fiber event like a Fiber Festival, your team could consist of folks with a deep knowledge of yarns and marketing, separate instructors with significant technique knowledge, and then a handful of us less crafty types with some of the more technical business knowledge. By bringing the team into the decision-making process early on to determine what is and is not feasible (“scoping the work”), you and your business can be sure to have a better understanding up front of what you can (and more importantly what you cannot) accomplish in a given period of time.

Minimum Viable Product/Shippable Units: In the software development space, research has shown that the average user base only heavily utilizes 20% of all of the features of a software application, following the classic Pareto 80/20 rule. Think about your business. Are there certain key elements that always seem to attract the most customer base? Do you have certain patterns that always seem to hit on what the customer wants? Agile is built around focusing on identifying what those elements are, bundling them together to create the leanest possible unit for work to ship, and then working towards that.

Applying that principal to your business can dramatically help you drive your Return on Investment, as once you are able to focus on these areas, you are able to cut to the core of drawing in your customer base. Then, once you have a solid project or process up and running supporting that desire to be taught a specific skill in one of your classes, you can enhance that with additional features that may apply to a smaller set of customers. Doing this is following the tenant of breaking down your projects or work into smaller features called Shippable Units that can be developed in a shorter period of time.

Timeboxing: As mentioned at the beginning, managing your time effectively is crucial for any business owner. As an example, I have allocated myself 60 minutes to write this article. Following the Agile principal of timeboxing, a discreet amount of time is set aside for any one task, meeting, or work item. When that time is up for the day, no matter at what state the project is in, you should stop and move to your next item. Many different studies from business to medical have demonstrated that mulitasking is actually a misnomer, and the human brain loses efficiency when rapidly switching between tasks.

As such, being able to focus on one item at a time, like updating your website with your latest shipment of yarn or re-arranging your models for an upcoming trunk show, work it for a specific period of time, and then close out that piece of work before moving on can dramatically increase the efficiency in how an individual or team gets work done. So when you have those daily team meetings, or find yourself bogged down answering your inbox, break up your task into specific chunks, and timebox them. It may take you longer to accomplish that one task, but by knowingly addressing items one at a time you are able to accomplish a lot more work as a whole.

Overall, the Agile methodology is gaining traction in many large and medium sized corporations and is still being developed and tweaked as additional lessons are learned. While this overview has just scratched the surface, it’s an interesting mindset to begin thinking about when approaching your business planning for the coming year. For another approach on how to use some of these tenants, check out this great post from Agile Advice. And with that, I’m timeboxing this post for today!

~ Mr. Turtle

From the Business Desk: Stakeholder Engagement

September 9, 2014 by Jennifer Raymond

From the Business Desk is back. From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This feature revolves around managing the many important parties your business works with on a daily basis.

Due to the specialized nature of a fibre arts small business, you most likely are interfacing with a large number of external parties in your day to day business operations. From suppliers and vendors to accountants and banks to individual customers, the web of interactions you weave is a significant challenge to manage for any business owner.

Complex web of your network. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Managing these types of interactions with all of these various individuals is key to a business’s well being, as often times a business is judged by the market not by it’s actual results, but by how it operates and delivers results against its’ expectations. You see this a lot of times with Fortune 500 companies where although they could show spectacularly profitable results, if these do not meet the expectations of the organization, things like it’s image, reputation, clientele, or stock price can suffer.

There are many in-depth training classes you can take from high-paid consultants on how you can accomplish this; what I’m going to do is share some high-level tips for how we at Tinking Turtle keep track of things here to best manage the expectations of all of the interrelated individuals we commonly interact with.

Constant External Communication. Communication is absolutely tops in managing any sort of relationship that you have, be it with a vendor for ordering supplies, or a customer expecting a deliverable on a particular project. Often times, when you know things are not going according to plan and you cannot meet a deadline, the earlier you can communicate this, the better. That way things don’t come as a shock to those impacted, and if you can both communicate the issue and what you are doing to resolve it, you can ensure your relationships are positively maintained. Studies show that customer loyalty can actually be increased if your business takes ownership and provides an exceptional level of service in the event of a customer service issue.

Internal Communication. If your business has more than one employee, it is vital that all of the staff are on the same page and have access to information regarding the various stakeholders that they interact with. Nothing is more off-putting than to have an external vendor be told “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about” in relation to an issue. This could be something as simple as having a weekly staff meeting, or a common room whiteboard with a high level FYI list of things to be aware of for all of the associates to have access to. There are also technology solutions to allow these relationships to be documented, having a CRM application is one avenue that Tinking Turtle uses, as to us, everyone we interact with from vendors to contractors to customers is tracked in our system.

Understanding Expectations. The last item I want to stress here is the importance of actually understanding the expectations of everyone you interact with. A classic example of this can be found in the Project Management Tire Swing analogy, which has been around for quite some time and is demonstrated in many introduction to Stakeholder Engagement classes.

The importance of understanding expectations.

By making assumptions about what is really necessary in a relationship, the chance for misscommunication is high, which then leads to situations where one party’s expectations are vastly different than the other. A good way to think about this in any interaction is to ensure that both you and the other party have clearly understood conditions of satisfaction that need to be met as part of this relationship. In ensuring that you have established these up front, it is much easier to then set expectations, and then identify areas that can be changed as the nature of the relationship changes.

These are only a few of the ways that small businesses can work to ensure that the relationships with the many individuals and organizations with which they interact remain strong. It is the strength of these relationship, and how engaged you are keeping all parties involve that can really be a stragic benefit to the long-term success of any fiber arts business.

From the Business Desk: Leveraging your Strengths

August 18, 2014 by Jennifer Raymond

As any small business owner knows, it’s a fierce world out there to break into any market. Be it establishing a LYS, becoming your own design company, breaking into the teaching circuit, all of these arenas seem to have well established entities that have solid client bases that seem to have everything put together. How will you ever be able to differentiate your new business and your ideas from the existing market, you may ask yourself. One of the handiest tricks of the business trade to help you accomplish this is the SWOT analysis. Standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, this analysis can help you start to make sense of your business’s place in the market, and areas which you can develop to better differentiate and market your ideas.

SWOT Matrix overview. Image courtesy of wikipedia.org

Fitting neatly into a 2 x 2 matrix (one of my favorite visualizations for many different business strategies), the SWOT analysis can help you identify some key attributes both about your business as well as the marketplace.

Strengths are the things that your business does quite well or has a key competitive factor; items could include physical location of a shop in a high-traffic downtown area, or having a well rounded resume of instruction at a variety of locations.

Weaknesses are known areas where you could use some improvement; an example of this could be that you don’t really possess a strong skill-set on computer tools like Excel or Microsoft Publisher as a designer.

Opportunities are areas that in your opinion the market or industry has not fully realized, such as there being a wealth of crocheters living in a particular town, but no dedicated crochet instructor.

Threats can be anything externally that stands the chance of impeding the growth and progress of your business. Threats can be micro, such as the fact that there is already a teacher who has been teaching a particular class that you want to start teaching at a regional fair, or macro, such as the overall state of the retail yarn market in a particular state.
Remember, these should be fairly high-level; while it’s good to have an in-depth analysis of your business and the market, for the first time that you do this exercise, try to distill it down to the top three or four attributes in each category.

Once you have developed your ideas and thoughts, it’s time to tweak the matrix to help understand how this can lead to a strong business plan development.

SWOT action item Matrix

By combining each of these categories in a grid, you can identify specific action items that emerge from the attribute clusters. The two most important areas to be aware of and consider are the Strength-Opportunities and the Weakness-Threat quadrants. These two reflect the immediate areas for business development and defense strategy respectively.

Breaking down your businesses’ market position utilizing the SWOT analysis, you can simply and easily lay the groundwork for a comprehensive business plan that can help you take advantage of market opportunities. One final note about the SWOT analysis; it is not meant to be a static market. Over time, both your business strengths and weaknesses as well as your perceived opportunities and threats in the market can significantly change. It’s a good idea to review and update this grid on a regular schedule (here at Tinking Turtle we review our SWOT items quarterly and develop a new SWOT matrix annually). By doing this, you can ensure that you are aware of where you need to focus your business development objectives for the near future.

~ Mr. Turtle

From the Business Desk: Finishing Projects

August 11, 2014 by Jennifer Raymond

After a delay due to some career changes that Jen talked about earlier, From the Business Desk is back. From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This feature revolves around ensuring that all of your business projects have fully completed.

As a small business owner, staying on top of everything necessary to run your business is no small task. With a constant turmoil of new projects, new customers, and everyday business inquiries, it is important to understand what is required for you to close out your existing projects; by successfully and formally closing out a project, it can be put to rest with all parties comfortable that their requirements have been met.

Not all Project Management needs to be this complicated. A few
simple tips can keep you on track to successful completion.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart

One of the first items to be aware of in the closing stage of a project is that it’s important to identify up front what the final items on your project or to-do list are. For example, if you are working on establishing and running a new class at your shop, you may think that the project is complete when the class runs. Thinking this out ahead of time can help you identify items that are always good to check off before putting a project to bed Namely, ensuring that all compensation and contractual terms have been met and a project post-mortem to document lessons learned. Following through with these steps ensures that you don’t forget some of the important elements of a project for any business: getting paid, and meeting legal obligations. A post-mortem, either publicly or internally is a good time for one or more parties involved to learn from the project, documenting what went well and what could use improvement for next time.

This is an example of using Insightly to keep track of project tasks.
This is the project list for the pattern Sweet Strawberries.

Keeping track of all of this can be overwhelming; fortunately there are several options available that are easy to use in web form. I’d recommend ZOHO Projects or Freedcamp as two of the better solutions available out there for someone just getting started. Other options include systems that link Customer Relationship Management and Project Management. Here at Tinking Turtle, our CRM system, Insightly includes an integrated Project Management module. This provides additional functionality to link projects to various associated parties, and track when a project is waiting on a third party to take action.

No matter how extensive or basic your knowledge of projects is, ensuring that you take some time on all of your projects to double check that your steps are completed is well worth the peace of mind.. The more projects that can be completed without final steps left un-done, the easier managing the entire workload of your business can be.

~ Mr. Turtle

Idea of Thirds for Online Content

April 16, 2014 by Jennifer Raymond

This is the next edition of a semi-regular series From the Business Desk I am writing to look at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This feature revolves around some ideas and concepts that you can use when posting content online and via social media.

Driving content to any website or blog isn’t easy. Especially with the proliferation of social media and so-called link aggregation sites like Buzzfeed or Tumblr, online viewers are faced with an overwhelming amount of content to sift through. How can you, the publisher, rise above the noise, and provide your audience with a healthy variety of content to keep them engaged and continuing to return to your site? Social Media giant Facebook has some analysis from their experience, much of it is good advice: ask questions, vary your style, and keep up your volume.

In terms of content, however, there’s a quick little memonic that I’ve always believed in to help you not only have varied style and volume, but different topics as well. I think this is particularly apropos for the fiberarts industry, where so much of the culture and community is derived from sharing new ideas and teaching others’ new tips and techniques. It’s called the Idea (or rule) of Thirds for Online Content. It goes like this:

1/3 of your content should be Informational
1/3 should be Instructional
1/3 should be Personal

Here at Tinking Turtle, we try (and emphasis on try given life’s challenges as mentioned before) to come up with a monthly posting schedule and theme, and then break down the posts based on these buckets.

This is our Posting Schedule for last November. Note the other topics for me at the bottom… I’m just now getting to writing about the Idea of Thirds!

Each of these buckets can engage a different set of readers, or engage frequent readers in different ways. The Informational grouping for content can encompass topics such as reviews of new patterns, new yarns, new books, or other knowledge based topics that you the poster want to share with your audience, for example this post you’re reading! Instructional topics are pretty straight forward, and engage the folks’ who peruse your site hoping to learn something new (like Jen’s Embroidering with Crochet piece) or with a question to be answered. Instructional topics can also lead into a more active offline engagement with readers, as once they have learned a technique or style they may want to pursue that with you through one on one interactions or even taking an in depth class.

Personal topics are topic matter most commonly associated with blogs; they are stories, experiences, and musings of the poster (such as my German Restaurant post about the origins of the Tinking Turtle name from last year) and add a human element to a website. Readers want to know they are dealing with people, not robots, and having this down to earth content helps drive that connection to keep them coming back.

There are any number of ways you can break down posting content to achieve variety to provide engaging and provoking content. The Idea of Thirds is one great concept to keep in the back of your mind when contemplating your online content, whatever the platform, going forward!

~ Mr. Turtle

Technology and Organization: How to stay on top of your files.

February 18, 2014 by Jennifer Raymond

This is the next edition of a semi-regular series From the Business Desk I am writing to look at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This month’s feature revolves around using some technology solutions to manage the data and documents your business creates.

In today’s technological age, more and more business documents are being created, transmitted, and stored solely in an electronic format. Gone are the days of massive file rooms and large physical filing cabinets full of records; for small businesses in particular, digital storage is a booming need. Being able to store and organize documents smartly is a crucial aspect of any business operation, and the time and effort saved through organization can make a real difference for a business of one or two employees. This is especially true for fiber arts design shops, where the products, patterns, and media being created comprise the bulk of the value for the business.

For the small business today, there are a wealth of resources available, ranging from free to very cost effective. These resources are able to store documents in a manner where they can be easily accessible to the business, yet secure and organized to protect the data. Cloud storage, available through Google, Apple, or Dropbox, to name but a few, can initially be used for free. This online storage can be accessed anywhere that you have an internet connection.

More locally is the emerging concept of a Personal Cloud. A personal cloud is a hybrid setup of storage; a cross between an internet based Cloud Storage service and a personal hard drive attached to a computer. Also known technically as Network Attached Storage (NAS), this technology solution allows you to create, save, and share documents locally within your own business or home network.

Tinking Turtle’s Personal Cloud looks like any Windows file structure, and
is organized and accessible across multiple computers.

Tinking Turtle has recently set up our own Personal Cloud system to store all of our business data including design information, contracts, and other important documents, in one simple, easy to access location that any computer on our business network can connect to. This allows us to categorize and file designs and other business documents in an organized, hierarchical manner, while still preserving the ability to share these among members of the business.

Personal Cloud providers such as Western Digital or Seagate now offer affordible data storage solutions with a wide range of features, including automatic backups, audio and video streaming services, and even the ability to access documents anywhere across the internet. This functionality offers small businesses a key competitive advantage, as by being organized with your company data, you are better able to use your available resources.

The Importance of Customer Relationship Management

December 11, 2013 by Jennifer Raymond

This is the second edition of a semi-regular series From the Business Desk I am writing to look at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber arts Business. This month’s feature revolves around using technology to grasp one of the key factors in the success of a business: your customers.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a huge buzzword in any business today. With more and more technology at our fingertips, it is easier than ever for the informed customer to make their purchasing decision, go shopping through e-commerce, or conduct their own research irregardless of advertising mediums. Businesses can and should be doing the same things with regards to their customers.

In theory, CRM revolves around tracking and recording every interaction a business has with their customers, from email conversations to support calls to purchasing history to who is prompt on payment. This is a lot to aggregate and understand, however by doing such, a business can derive significant information from this data. In larger businesses, there are dedicated CRM systems such as Salesforce that can be leveraged for that purpose; for small business however, many times these records live on post-it notes, sales receipts, and excel spreadsheets.

The Tinking Turtle facebook page lets us track who likes the company,
and who corresponds and interacts with our brand.

I wanted to take a moment to share a couple of good, and extremely cost effective resources for Small Businesses to use to be able to better track their customer information. The first is through Social Media. Like it or not, Facebook is the wave of the future for businesses, and by being involved in this network of potential customers, every interaction is recorded and available for review. Not only can you communicate directly with friends, family, and interested parties, you can document who is liking your page, their likes, and record shared content among them. In this way, you have a track record, a history of what brings your customers to your brand, and can use this to further development your business strategy.

We use Insightly to track the status of our
design projects among other uses

The second tool I would recommend every small business check out is an online CRM application. There are countless review sites out there to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of a whole world of CRM applications that are cheap or free to use for beginners. There is honestly no “best” site out there; a lot of the choice boils down to what you are doing as a business, and what features you value most. Tinking Turtle uses Insightly as our CRM. What drew me to implement this for the business earlier this year was its’ integration with Google Apps, a plus for the IT side of me, as well as its’ focus both on Customer Relationship and Project Management. In Insightly, it is easy for us to not only track who we do business with, and the data surrounding those relationships, but as well we can track opportunities and projects. Insightly’s “web of links” approach makes it easy to associate which design calls tie back to which publishing companies, for instance, and which projects were submitted for each call for submission. The best part about Insightly is that for the just starting small business, it free for a limited number of contacts and items. This lets any business use the system to get their feet on the ground, and then once they have reached a size where they have the financial strength to begin evaluating more features, they can easily continue that through the system.

No matter what your business does, be it fiber or yarn production, designing, or a LYS, having a method to aggregate your customer information is an excellent step to take to further your business success. I want to stress here that there is no right or wrong answer; if you have a card catalog and Rolodex that works for you, all for the better. However, as the customer moves more and more into the digital arena of the internet, I would encourage all business owners to consider some of the online tools discussed above.

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