Following is a guest post by a writer for Ordoro, a company I used to work with while I was at the Austin Technology Incubator. When she reached out to me to see if I would accept a guest post, I chuckled and thought what a small world it was. I like the team at Ordoro. They are doing great things and making a difference for small businesses.
Carolyn is a guest post writer on the subjects of small business management, small business tools, and inventory control. She believes that the right software is an essential part of what it takes for startups to succeed.
Why Every Small Business Should Have Inventory Management Software
Inventory will hog all of your company’s cash if you allow it to do so. Think about it. You pay your suppliers, and you wait for them to ship goods to you. Then you wait for your employees to turn those goods into finished products you can sell. Once the products are ready to sell, you have to wait for customers to buy them. As you may have noticed, turning inventory into cash involves a lot of waiting. That’s why it’s essential that you do everything you can to increase your inventory turnover rate as much as possible. When it comes to inventory control, one of the most effective tools a small business owner can take advantage of is inventory management software. Here’s what inventory management software can do for your small business:
Inventory control software helps you identify what you need to order from suppliers at any given time. This kind of software gives you a clear picture of your inventory levels. If your bestselling product is almost sold out, it’s probably crucial that you order more of it as soon as possible. If you aren’t using software that allows you to monitor your inventory levels easily, it’s much more difficult to order what you need when you need it.
Small business inventory software helps you identify slow-moving products. If you analyze the data provided by inventory management software, it will be more simple and efficient for you to identify products that are slow-moving. Once you know what isn’t selling, you can order less of it from your suppliers and ultimately have more cash freed up to purchase other inventory that is selling well.
Tracking inventory shipments from multiple suppliers can be difficult, and inventory management software can help. It’s crucial that you know when inventory is going to arrive, so you can plan your sales efforts accordingly. Inventory management software is probably the best tool to use if you want to track your orders and shipments from different suppliers.
If you’re an e-commerce merchant, inventory management software like the software offered by Ordoro will help you keep track of your inventory across multiple webstores. It’s no small feat to keep track of what’s being sold where and what’s in stock overall as a result. That’s why it’s generally a good idea for e-commerce merchants to enlist the help of some quality software, especially if they’re trying to run a small business without much help from anyone else.
Inventory management software is hardly ever expensive, especially when you consider the ROI. With this type of software, you’ll be able to increase your inventory turnover rate by ordering what you need, halting orders of what you don’t need, getting the most out of your relationships with suppliers, and staying organized no matter how many stores or webstores you own. So, why make things harder on yourself without this integral software tool?
The following is a guest post from Kiva’s press team:
Kiva launches Kiva.org/women and Partners with Dermalogica’s joinFITE to Give Away $100,000 in Loans to Women around the World
KivaFor those of you who have made loans on Kiva.org in the past, this will come as a piece of good news. For those who haven’t – it’s a double whammy: you’re being introduced to Kiva AND finding out about their newest venture!
First, here’s what Kiva does, in a nutshell: Kiva.org is the world’s first and largest microlending website where anyone, anywhere can help alleviate poverty and empower entrepreneurs across the globe through loans as small as $25. Lending through Kiva creates a ripple effect in a local economy because with as little as $25, you enable an entrepreneur to build their business and bring goods to their community. As these businesses grow, so do other opportunities: to employ other members of the community, or to make enough money to send their children to school and learn to perhaps become business owners themselves one day. So your $25 loan might help lift an entire village out of poverty!
The best part: When the loan is repaid, you can choose to re-lend your money to help another entrepreneur, maintaining a growing cycle of progress. If you want to read some wonderful entrepreneur stories for yourself, check out how Flaura’s photocopy business, Kumri’s sewing shop, Glory’s goats and Grace’s peanut butter came about or reached their potential thanks to Kiva loans.
The latest piece of good news from the folks at Kiva is that, in honor of International Women’s Day, they are launching Kiva.org/women on March 7, 2012 to help empower women and create sustainable change.
To kickstart it, Dermalogica’s joinFITE program is funding a $100,000 Kiva Women free trial program. What does this mean for you? Free money! You’ll be able to make $25 loans to a female borrower of your choice without fronting a single penny (for as long as the Dermalogica money lasts).
Just for the record, Kiva has already been helping women around the world: since its launch in 2005, more than 80% of the loans funded through Kiva have been to women borrowers in 60 countries including the United States. Kiva has connected more than 600,000 women borrowers to nearly 650,000 lenders, crowdfunding more than $200 million in loans to women.
Because women have proven to be such massive agents of change in impoverished communities when given a minimum of resources, this program is designed to focus specifically on them.
Today I had the privilege of attending a fundraising lunch for Little Helping Hands, an Austin based non-profit that assists children/families in in volunteering for great causes in Austin. It was founded by two philanthropic, social entrepreneur parents who wanted to instill those same values in their kids. They organize kid friendly events so other non-profits in Austin can benefit from families and kids who want to volunteer together. Examples include helping to assemble and disassemble computers for organizations like Goodwill and giving out totes full of clothes and goodies to kids in foster care, etc. My good friend Rachel Muir invited me to the event. I am looking forward to finding an event where the kids and I can go volunteer together someday soon. I don’t think my kids realize how lucky they are and how much they have. I think instilling “giving back” values at this age will be valuable for them and whatever community they find themselves living in when they are older.
Congratulations to the Bazaarvoice team! They are the latest Austin technology company to go public. It happened yesterday. I have friends who work there and I’m very happy for them. It takes a lot to go from zero to public and for Austin’s sake, I hope they continue their growth trend and create value. As I commented on the Austin Startup post on the topic, Bazaarvoice’s going public creates value not only for those who work there but also value in terms of dollars invested in future start-ups and experienced people to advise/mentor them.
The founding team also emphasized building a positive culture and showed that policies like having no set vacation days can work when you trust your people. It will be nice to have people in the community who have experienced that kind of culture go seed other companies.
Fred Wilson has been doing a very interesting series on Management Teams for the last several weeks on his blog. It is part of his MBA Monday series and this section was on building and maintaining the management team. They just did a wrap up post called The Management Team – Guest Post By Jerry Colonna – The Crucible of Leadership. It’s well written and gets to the heart of the matter of what makes the difference between good and great leaders and managers. So much easier to say than do. I feel like I’ve been through a Crucible and I hope that I’ll get an opportunity to see what I’ve learned about the topic and practice my leadership skills. Empowering people and getting things done are near and dear to my heart and apparently seem to align to my strengths according to Strength’s Finder 2.0.
Bottom line is that we are all different. We aren’t Steve Jobs or Bill Gates and we shouldn’t strive to be. We need to find that place where our passions, skills, and opportunity come together. constantly look inward and then work on it until something happens. We need to accept and stare our demons down as we can’t fight them because the more we do, the more they stick around to haunt us. Surrender to the demons and they will surrender to you or leave you be is what Colonna mentions in his post.
We all have the same amount of time (barring unforeseen, usually dire circumstances) to do what we are meant to do or want to do while here on earth. It doesn’t really matter if we are born knowing what we are supposed to do or we aren’t. In the case of Hugo (movie), he discovered his purpose in life was to fix other people, things, automatons, and clocks. A series of unfortunate and fortunate events led him to the automaton/person he was meant to fix.
Sometimes time feels like it ticks so painfully slowly when you aren’t able to do what you want to do, be with the people you want to be with, or ironically figure out what your purpose is in life. But then all of a sudden you look up, notice that time has slipped through your fingers and you realize…you rationalize…you reason that maybe this was just all the way it was supposed to turn out. But you know there were points in the road of life where you could have gone a different seemingly easier or treacherously hard way. Would it have resulted in fame, fortune, finding your soul mate, and great health or would you have been run over by a bus?
Timing is everything, but the passing of “time” is the one thing none of us can change until my kids someone invents a time machine. Many of us spend so much time chasing something just out of our reach, so much so that it must be human nature. But when do we stop…do we stop? We can’t stop! Or can we? Well, maybe after we discover intelligent life on another planet.
I’ve always found Valentine’s Day to be an unusual day. Such significance placed on a day when really the 364 (or 365 in this leap year) other days of the year are what really constitute love and endurance. My thoughts on this day are generally too philosophical to share easily so here are some random thoughts:
Chocolate covered strawberries (well chocolate covered almost anything) are yummy.
Money comes and goes. Apparently so does love.
“Sometimes one smile means more than a dozen roses” – on the wrapper of one of the Dove chocolate squares (given to me by my best friend for my birthday) my kids and I melted in a small pot before dipping strawberries & mandarin oranges in it.
Love shows up in the strangest and sometimes most unexpected of places and people.
My kids are my best valentine’s “dates” ever, and they are showing me how to dance the “shuffle dance.”
My son showed me that you can search Wikipedia in different languages.
My daughter’s smile and laugh melt my heart.
Google’s Valentine’s Day home page video (you tube link; embedded below) is so simple and true. People fall in love when someone quits giving you stuff you don’t want or need and “connects” with who you are and what you enjoy.
Benjy Portnoy, founder of Austin-based media company, Mouthpiece Media, is producing a 2-hour, all-inclusive class for small business owners on how to build and maintain their own website.
The seminar has the business owner in mind who knows they need a great website, but don’t want to bother with confusing coding or anything difficult to update. Instead the class will focus on how to build and maintain a site in WordPress, a simple-yet-powerful and scalable system that anyone can use to create a beautiful website in no time.
The course will cover every aspect of building a basic website, including:
Picking and registering a web address
Choosing the right “hosting company” to put the files
How to install WordPress in 5 minutes or less
A custom tour of the WordPress dashboard
How to create posts, pages, and even upload photos and videos
How to change the entire look of your site in a single click
Basics on how to get your site ranked in Google
Lots more
Date: Tuesday, February 21, 2012, 1:30 pm-3:30 pm Place: Wyndham Garden Austin & Woodward Conference Center Price: $37 Only 20 spots available More info: www.mouthpiece-media.com/wpclass
Some people serve as bridges during good times and bad and others are just trolls. If you are a parent, especially of girls, you have most likely heard of Dora the Explorer and the grumpy old troll who doesn’t let anyone cross his bridge unless they do certain things, behave a certain way, or answer certain questions. He is an unhappy soul.
Some people reach out to you only when they need something, but otherwise aren’t very helpful when you reach out to them. They don’t seem to really care what’s going on with you, or even bother to notice if you are in a pickle even if you ask for help. Some people burn bridges intentionally and others aren’t aware they are doing so.
We can all be bridges and help people get to where they are trying to go. It doesn’t have to be a diamond studded bridge…even a kind word, a pat on the back, a few words of encouragement, or an introduction to someone else who can help them can go a long way to bridge someone to their destination.
I remember a saying I heard when I was in college that went something like: always be kind and generous to people who come to you for help in their time of need, because you never know when you will be in a similar situation someday. Good, caring people help us get through the challenges and even the glories of life. I’ve also heard it said in a more foreboding way “Be careful who you step on when you are climbing up the corporate ladder, for they may be in a position to help you when/if the rungs break, due to things in or out of your control, and you come falling down .”
Be kind. Be a bridge for someone during their time of need and don’t put terms and conditions on your help…just do it. Things have a way of coming around. I’ve been blessed with many wonderful “people” bridges, and I hope I am perceived as being as helpful to others as they have been to me.
Most of us know that timing has a lot to do with things turning out as desired or not. If you try to bring a product to market before it’s time (e.g., anything similar to the iPad that came out before the iPad), you often fail. If you take too long, you can miss the proverbial boat. This is true for a) your career, b) relationships/love, c) start-ups, or d) teaching your kids to ride a bike.
My daughter just started riding a bike this weekend. Her brother learned when he was 5 1/2 and she’s almost 7 (2nd child with parents who are crazy busy). I knew she had good balance given she rode her scooter around the house and on the street & sidewalks with ease. So this weekend her dad put her on the bike we got her last Christmas and on the first try she was riding easily. She was ready and the timing was right! I think it was partly because we didn’t make a big deal of it or try to make it happen before she was ready.
If you had given me chocolate mixed with salt 5 to 10 years ago, I would have probably spit it out or not even tried it, but Dark chocolate with a touch of sea salt is remarkably yummy. Timing. I’m still not fond of chocolate mixed with peanuts, but maybe in 5 more years…
I haven’t blogged too much about my career recently because the company I went to work for after I left the Austin Technology Incubator back in August 2011 prohibited employees from mentioning on their blogs that we worked there. Needless to say, I did not know that before I joined and I’m no longer there. So the timing seemed right to hang up my consulting shingle for a while. My current, not very creative name, is ASG Consulting (LinkedIn). I just completed a project for a company in the clean energy/smart grid space and may do some more work for them in the future.
So here I go again attempting to create something that didn’t exist before, but now instead of a hardware or software product, I’m selling my time & expertise. I feel fortunate to live in a time, town, and space where I’m well connected and opportunities are like hidden Easter eggs waiting to be found. Who knows…one of these consulting jobs might end up in a full time job if the fit (skill match, culture, location, etc.) is right.
If I can help your company or someone elses you know with operations, strategy, and/or business development (particularly partner/client management), please ping me and let’s talk. Next up, I have to get some business cards…
The older I get more experience I gain working for different organizations, the more I realize that good leadership is rare and good management is even rarer. I think we all see this played out on TV with the incompetence demonstrated by our business and political leaders. I don’t really know why this happens and it’s sometimes a miracle that companies get built and keep going. It’s somewhat of an enigma to me….might be a bunch of great workers covering up for the incompetence of their leaders & managers.
The reason I think good management is rarer than good leadership is that one can be a good leader by finding and getting out of the way of great talent. They can also be a visionary leader with admittedly no management skills, but they are smart enough to find the good managers, support them, and let them do what they do best. Great managers listen and then react to input in order to make the jobs/lives of their team easier, more interesting, and fun without being overbearing/micro managing. To manage people on a daily basis and make things happen with so many personalities around the table is one of the most challenging things to do well while earning the respect & admiration of your team.
When you happen upon a great leader who is also a great manager, grab on to them…you’ve found a unicorn.
Martin Luther King, Jr. had a big dream. He had more courage and vision in his pinky than most of us have in our whole bodies. Here is an except from his speech “I Have A Dream.” (Go listen to the recording of his speech at this link).
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
Thank you for dreaming Mr. King. You helped changed the world with your courage and the risks you took to make life better for all of our children. Today I will remind the kids what dreaming big can mean.
Working Motherhood/Parenthood/Fatherhood requires you to try touching your elbow to your ear (yes, I tried it to make sure it was near impossible to do so) on more occasions than you’d like to admit
I hope in all this living around parents with an accidental (prone to earthquakes) entrepreneurial foundation, my kids are learning that they have to whine a little, adapt a lot, smile, try a bunch of different things, have faith that things will turn out as they should as long as they work hard and are kind to others…including animals and a select few insects like butterflies.
The Austin Songwriters Symposium that I wrote about in my previous post was amazing! It wrapped up this morning after a Sunday morning gospel jam session with the attendees and a lunchtime jam session with the pros. I don’t attend church often, but I love gospel music and hymns…they really pull at the heart strings of us sinners non perfect people. I learned a lot about a whole different industry. It’s even harder to make it in that industry than being a high tech entrepreneur. Songwriters are entrepreneurs. The main difference is that most songwriters make it on their own merit or maybe co-write with one or two other people. To build a successful high tech company requires hundreds of people moving in the same direction and buying into the same vision. The payoff can be bigger (95% of songwriters don’t make much money) in building a company but the complexity is higher. Most songwriters seemed to originally have wanted to make it big themselves as a singer singing their own songs but find themselves barely getting by playing their own songs in clubs or the more savvy ones end up writing for the great, well-known singers.
People like Joe Ely, Sonny Throckmorton, Gary Burr, Georgia Middleman (she sang a song called Dare To Dance Alone (YouTube) this morning that she co-wrote with Gary Burr that really touched me), Will Sexton, and Matthew Santos were in attendance and were either performing and/or hosting workshops. It was an eye opener. All of them wrote their own songs or wrote songs for many of the household name country singers of our time like Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Faith Hill, Reba McEntire, Martina McBride, Waylon Jennings, etc. I certainly don’t have any delusions visions that my songs will be published and adopted by great singers but it was nice to know I was not alone in wanting to create new songs. There were people of all ages and different stages of discovering songwriting. I met with a publisher and he had some great advice on a couple of the songs I had co-written…most of it I knew already, but there was a gem or two.
I didn’t realize before I attended how heavy the emphasis would be on country music, but I picked up a saying or two. One of them was the country music was nothing more than “three chords and the truth.” And that certainly seemed accurate to me by the end of the symposium…and the painful truth of us being human certainly comes out a lot in the lyrics of country music.
Attending the conference was a nice break from my daily routine and it was great to hear world class music played by people who obviously loved what they did. I was so impressed how they could get up on stage together, never played a song together, and then play off each other to produce professional sounding concerts. They way they were able to improvise and produce a joyful noise made me seriously think about finally learning to play the guitar!
I haven’t blogged too much about music or songwriting recently, but I signed up to attend the Austin Songwriters Group 8th Annual Songwriting Symposium this weekend and tonight was the first night…well it’s now past midnight as I’m writing this post. My voice teacher, Gene Raymond at Octave Higher, forwarded me a notice about it only a week ago and I figured ‘what the heck, I should go.’ So far so good. They had songwriters from Texas and Nashville singing their original music tonight. It was like having a semi-private concert given by very talented song writers in a smoke-free room where everyone was really interested in listening to the singers. In other words, people were focused on them and not talking to each other, trying to pick up dates, or drinking to excess. They were all so good and all of them said that no one goes into songwriting for the money. A guy named Jim Photoglo made a funny joke about marriage, sex, money, and songwriting but it’s probably not appropriate to write here. I’m looking forward to a guy named Sonny Throckmorton and a gal named Kimmie Rhodes talk about co-writing songs tomorrow (or shall I say later this morning).
Congressman Lloyd Doggett showed up since he’s a big supporter of the Austin music scene and gave a little speech. There were many references to some great country singers like Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, etc. because most of the music the singer/songwriters played this evening was country music. Whenever I hear country music, I remember a guy I worked with at Mr. Gatti’s pizza in high school who told me when I told him that I hated country music that it was because my heart hadn’t been really broken yet…and he was right. I get teary eyed when I hear good country music now.
I signed up to pitch my songs to one of three publishers who will be there on Sunday morning. We get 15 minutes with a publisher. I hope I’m brave enough to hum a few bars when it’s my turn because our songs are still in varying degrees of completion. I wish my songwriting partner could be there, but he’s too busy playing live gigs! We are hoping our schedules will allow us to finally record some of our stuff this year. I mean…come on…we have a facebook page for our two person band, so we have to accomplish something, right? Please go like our page: METAPHOR MANIA. I think we need 25 people to like it to remove the numbers from the URL so…do the right thing and wish me luck in pitching…I could use some positive affirmation right about now.
Kiva
Recent Comments