I decided to tackle Drupal for one of my Information Systems classes this semester. I chose this technology because I don’t know it at all (school is about learning, right?). Anyway, this book was an absolutely fantastic way to create a site in Drupal. Once the core Drupal files are installed, each chapter either has you installing another module to add more capabilities to the site or explains a concept your current setup is already capable of handling in more detail.
In gentle and logical steps the author guides you from a base Drupal installation to a site framework capable of handling anything from a blog or social network to a full-blown ecommerce site. The pacing is excellent as it is thorough enough to get you up and running and headed on the right path without bogging you down with so many details that you never seem to get to the next topic.
This book provides excellent advice and a few words of warning, but it doesn’t hold your hand. If you have problems with an installation or need more advanced knowledge about a particular topic, you will need to consult additional sources to get that information. This did not reduce the quality of the book as it is obviously intended as a quick start guide that gets you up and running in 24 brief lessons and then leaves you to further research the specifics that are necessary to fine-tune your site to your specific needs. Drupal’s strength is as a generic content management framework and that is what this book helps you create: A generic framework that is ready to handle whatever content you provide.
The author also assumes that you have some content that you are ready to use. This book doesn’t provide the learning environment that is common in many books where you slowly create a fake site for a fake company. You will need to have your own text, graphics, and other content to fill up your nodes.
The images are rather small, but, if you are following along with each step, you will have the same content represented on your computer screen in front of you so that you can read from that. This book also is written at an awkward time because of the upcoming release of version 7 of Drupal. The author does a very good job of telling you (and in many cases showing you) the difference between versions 6 and 7. Overall, this is a fantastic book for getting the framework for a Drupal site up and running.
Tags: book review, Drupal, Social Networking, Web Development
The fear of success is not an uncommon fear. You may or may not have this fear by nature or nurture, but in planning your business it is a fear you need to cultivate.
Perhaps in your creative visualization of your business future you ultimately picture yourself sipping large and tasty beverages decorated with small and colorful umbrellas while sitting in a lounge chair at a seaside resort while a bevy of executives and managers run your company for you. (Of course this comes after years of hard work and long hours on your part and so you have earned this privilege.) That’s a great goal and keep working towards it.
In the meantime, you must address what success really means and why you need to be afraid of it. Success requires the two things that are most precious to any business owner: time and money. Success can happen as planned, but will more often happen at a speed that is outside of the control of a business owner. Anything that uses precious assets and resources and can be relatively unpredictable should cause a business owner to lose sleep. A business plan addresses the issue of success so that you can lose your sleep now rather than later.
Take out a piece of paper and plot out a monthly or annual plan for your business success. Things to think about and write down are progressive stages of an increase in customers, business expansion and increased productivity. Depending on the nature of your business this may be a long or a short list. Build a pattern of gradual increases in supply and demand covering a period of several years. At each point indicate the total number of customers, goods or services needed, and the total number of employees required to obtain these goals. Jot down (or at least think of) the amount of money needed to operate at each of these levels. When you are done, you should have a clear path that will take you well on your way to that beach resort you’ve been dreaming about.
Now that your perfect-case scenario has been mapped out, cross out half of the stages at random. Take a quarter of the remaining stages and reduce them to show a decline in customers and/or production from the previous remaining period. Now cross out a few more at random (leaving most of your declining points). If it hasn’t happened already, squeeze the dates for some of the events to be close together and some to be very far apart. Try to be as random as possible about declines and increases (even if you know your business will have seasonal highs and lows). Ultimately this will give you a somewhat more realistic idea of what your business operations will look like: It will show the upward and downward trends of the business cycle combined with the unpredictable nature of the consumer.
Perhaps in looking at this you think that the bad times will be bad, but the good times will be good and you’ll deal with the turns as they come. If you save money from the good times to cover the expenses of the bad times, everything will be fine, right? In a word, wrong. If you save up enough money during the good times to only pay for the bad times, how will you pay for the good times that come later? In other words, how will you produce enough goods or hire enough employees to meet future customer demand if you only have enough money to operate at the current level? You need to cover clearly in your business plan the methods you intend to use to expand your business.
That isn’t really enough to cause you to fear success, but there are some scenarios that need to be thought about that should make you you cringe at the idea of success. Most potential business owners have a fear that they will open their doors (literal or figurative) and no one will show up. What should be equally as terrifying is the case where you open your doors and everyone shows up. You will simply not have the merchandise or services to meet the consumer demand. This isn’t actually that uncommon of a scenario in online businesses: a trickle of customers, a few orders, a larger and more steady flow of traffic and a gradual increase in orders, and then a link to the site or a review brings a deluge of potential customers to a site that can neither handle the site traffic nor supply the quantity of goods or services demanded. If you are not prepared for the scenario of bursts of success, you will lose customers. Once lost, you will not be able to get a majority of your customers back and the ones that you do get back will cost you a lot more to win back then they cost you to obtain to begin with.
So, take your plot from before and imagine that any of those points can happen at any point at any given day. You may go from a handful of customers to a thousand customers overnight and stay at that level before dropping off to a couple hundred customers for a few months and suddenly having 10,000 customers show up in a single week. This is all happening out of nowhere and with no marketing efforts on your part and you would be the happiest business owner in the world if you only hadn’t had to turn away 9,125 of the customers because you are out of stock and/or understaffed. And all the customers you turned away complained about your poor service and stated that they will not only not be coming back, but will make sure that everyone they know is aware of how bad your company is.
That is the nightmare of success and the reason you must learn to fear it. Then you must learn to plan for it so that there is nothing to fear.
Now, get out a fresh piece of paper and jot down the ways that success could hit you like a rock. Follow that up by addressing each issue. How will you deal with a lack of merchandise? Will you buy it from a competitor? Will you take advanced orders or offer rain checks? How fast can purchase or produce new inventory? Where will you get the funds to pay for the additional inventory? How much inventory do you think you will need to have on hand to cover expansion (the big crystal ball question)? For internet and catalog orders: Will you limit order to merchandise in stock and lose sales? Will you go ahead and take orders even though you can’t ship right away? Is it legal to take orders without merchandise in stock? Does it meet with your payment processing agreement to take orders on merchandise you don’t have? For service businesses: Do you have enough employees to cover your needs? How fast can you obtain new employees? Can you outsource the work? Do you want to outsource the work? Do you have enough hours in the day/week/month to complete the work? If you have a “day job” at what point will you need to quit it in order to meet demand? Are you really willing to do so?
There is no real and solid way to plan for success. In your business plan, you are only required to explain the best ways that you have planned to handle situations in which demand exceeds supply. Be sure to keep an eye towards customer service and retention in your growth statements. Basically, you need to address these issues only to prove that you have put effort into thinking about the path to success and acknowledge the reality that it can be more frightening than failure. Ultimately, we can inspire demand, but we cannot control it.
It’s time to face a fact (or at least a fact that investors require you to acknowledge in a business plan): Despite your best efforts, your business may not succeed.
No one starting a business wants to think about the potential for what they might regard as failure. The important thing to realize is that going out of business is not a sign of failure if you have acknowledge the potential and planned for it so that it can happen gracefully. An exit strategy is not only required in a proper business plan, it is also a sign that you are a business professional and realize that even the best ideas do not always succeed.
Right now, take out a piece of paper and write down all the businesses and products that you know are no longer around. Think about that favorite candy you had as a child that can’t be bought any more: Did the company go out of business or just stop offering the product? What happened to that restaurant you used to go to all the time a few years ago? Take some time to research current business closures and recently filed bankruptcies in your area of business. Find out what went wrong for these businesses. Where does the company place the blame? If it’s an article, does the author give some idea of the reason for the business failure?
You will perhaps discover in your investigations that it is often something far from the business owners’ control that caused their businesses to fail. These days the chief reason is often just the generic catchall of “The Economy.” There is also the second favorite of “Changes in Consumer Behavior.” Are these excuses to explain bad business practices and mismanagement? In some cases the answer is, of course, a resounding “yes.” But, in most cases, the businesses really did have to close because of a gradual or sudden change in consumer behavior or income.
Perhaps it can be best explained that while you have almost infinite control over your potential for success, you have somewhat limited control over your potential for failure. The only way you can control failure is by trying to succeed and being ready to successfully end operations before your company fails. A good exit strategy makes going out of business as positive of an event as such a scenario can possibly be. How did the companies you looked into enact their exit strategies? Was their dignity and grace (and perhaps even profit) in their closure?
Now that you are done looking into the worst worse-case scenarios of other companies, it’s time to look into your crystal ball for your business and figure out what you would do if your business needs to shut down. What markers will you use to indicate that you have reached a point of no return? Will it be the amount of money you are taking in or the amount of money you are putting out that will herald the end of days? Will you enact your exit strategy at the point when there are simply no funds left to function (run the company into the ground) or will you time it so that you can pay off your debts and end up breaking even? Perhaps you will even time it so that you can make a small profit at the end to fund another venture or support you for a time while you look for work. It’s up to you to decide under what circumstances you will close operations. Write down your ideas of the why’s and when’s of an exit strategy.
When you have your reasons for an exit strategy clearly defined, it’s time to make the plan for how’s of closing down your company. Make note of what you will do with any remaining assets. Will you sell of your equipment? If so, who will you sell it to and how much will you get? What about remaining inventory? What about money you are owed? What about your debts? How will you pay off your debts and end your liabilities?
That last point is vital: You need to pay off your debts. Depending on the structure of your business, in the majority of cases, the debts of your business will become your personal debts when the business ceases to operate. Even if your business structure provides some protection for your personal assets, it will not prevent your debtors from filing legal actions for collection. They may or may not win these law suits, but it will cost you money and time to defend yourself against them. A proper and professional exit strategy will resolve all debts and eliminate the liability of all parties involved in the ownership of the business. Your exit strategy should leave a clean slate behind and leave you able to claim your suppliers and previous debtors among your good references.
To write a good exit strategy, you will need to balance the markers of when and why to close against the need to pay off debts. It should be noted that you may not realistically be able to pay off long term debts such as business loans and mortgages through liquidation. Acknowledge that these loans will become your personal debts (if they are not already) when the business ends and address how you would intend to pay them even if there is no longer an operating business.
On an off-topic note, you should also realize the potential of personal liability inherent in long term debts before using such funding for your startup business. I’ll leave that to a future post.
Tags: assets, business loans, business plan, business planning, Fear of Failure, liabilities