Elevate CA Blog

Only a few days until WordCamp New Zealand on the 7th and 8th of August.  WordCamp is two day conference focusing on anything and everything on and around the WordPress platform.

This is a global event that has been held 66 times since the beginning of 2009 everywhere from California to Istanbul, Lima – and another 63 far-away places as well.

WordPress is a free to download >>> open source Content Management System, often used as a blog publishing application – and as a platform for more static websites.  It is developed by its community, including a group of volunteers who test each release.  WordPress also powers some of New Zealand’s best websites including the Stuff blog >>> and of course our very own Elevate CA blog >>>.

So what?

And why would anyone want to spend a weekend rubbing shoulders with a bunch of folk with nothing else in common than the platform they happen to use for their website?

Well it may be that I’m a bit unusual, but here’s why I’m looking forward to this event:

As well as getting upskilled on WordPress, WordCamps are all about getting to meet other WordPress users.  And the WordPress community is an interesting one ranging from tech-focussed geeks through to entrepreneurs with fantastic projects who are capable of making real change in their particular niche.

Entrepreneurship fascinates me – along with the process of bringing great ideas to fruition.  So if I can lock myself away at WordCamp New Zealand for a day or so and mix with a bunch of people who are making exciting things happen, then that works for me.  Here >>> are some of the speakers scheduled for this event – and the list of attendees will be just as interesting.

If you’d like to follow the event remotely on twitter the hashtag for this event is #wordcampnz.  I’ll keep you posted on my personal highlights after the event right here.

Here’s a story that demonstrates how easy it is to get communications wrong – and to produce an unintended and counterproductive emotional reaction.

There’s a social venture called BrightMind LABS I’m involved with, which released its first product 12 months or so back.  The primary target market is the half million or so parents of children aged 4 to 10 who are diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome or high functioning autism – and who are located in the USA.  The product is a downloadable application designed to teach these kids to recognise and respond appropriately to emotions – skills that kids on the autistic spectrum often struggle to acquire as easily and naturally as do neurotypical children.

The challenge with this venture is to clearly convey the value proposition on-line – and to demonstrate that although half a world away, we are trustworthy and our offering is clinically robust.  All written and visual collateral must single mindedly reinforce that message.

So far so good, right?

As part of our on-line communications package, we decided to produce a short video clip showing three kids in the target age group using the application – along with a voice over explaining the features and benefits.  The intended message was this:

 

“This product is different and better than anything else available because not only is it clinically robust, but you won’t need to coerce your children to engage – they will love to play it”. 

 

The supporting video was professionally produced featuring three local Whangarei kids.  I should mention that two of these were my own children. 

So we posted the video to the web site and stood by for the incremental lift in sales that would surely result from this clear visual demonstration and explanation of our offering.

But rather than conversion rates increasing, the number of sales per 100 unique visitors to the website actually dropped when we posted the video.  How could that be?  What was going on here?

It took a while to figure it out, but eventually we got it: 

 

What we saw were three happy, physically healthy Whangarei kids fully engaged in an innovative PC application.

What our target market saw was three unkempt urchins playing on a computer.  White trash, dare I say it. 

 

Not an aspirational image at all for our target parents in middle America!

For the Kiwi market, the kids looked normal, outdoorsy and healthy.  But for our target market to identify with these kids, we ought to have portrayed an all-American preppy image – with freshly cut hair and ironed shirts.  A couple of well placed items of baseball apparel would have completed the picture nicely.  And I definitely should have scrubbed the kids’ finger nails before the shoot!

Duh.  We sure got it wrong. 

But this is not about BrightMind LABS – there is a bigger point to this story, and here it is: 

 

When devising communications for your business, test them on your target market before you invest your time and cash. 

 

It doesn’t matter whether your target market is Whangarei business owners, adolescent girls, Kiwi dairy farmers, high growth start-ups – or US parents of kids on the autistic spectrum.

A professional in this field would probably advise you to conduct focus groups or one-on-one interviews of a sample of your target market before pressing the go button on any communication plan.  And this seems great advice if you are investing a significant amount – or if you only have one shot to get it right.  But as a minimum, make sure you find a sample of people in your target market who will give you honest feedback – and then ask them to be merciless.

You need to know up front that your message will come across clearly – and that there will be no unintended emotional reactions that will create a barrier to your call to action.

This is about sustained creativity and innovation. 

But first let me contextualise.  A big thank you to the almost 40 business owners who braved the mid winter chill to come along to Thursday’s Business Owners Forum.  As always, there was plenty of quality content – and some healthy dissention amongst the panel.

The topic was close to the hearts of many business owners – motivating and rewarding your team and keeping the crew fired up.  On the panel was:

David Grindle, a partner with Webb Ross Lawyers, who were awarded the New Zealand Legal Personnel Employer of Choice at the 2007 Law Awards.  Webb Ross takes motivating and rewarding their team very seriously – and David’s story of their journey in this area was inspiring.

Rebecca Brennan, a director of Elevate CA Limited.  Rebecca is an experienced leader and motivator of high performing teams and she shared some of the tips and traps gleaned from practicing her lead-from-the-front ethos.

Michael Masterson, a director of LookAt Limited shared his keep-it-simple philosophy for building great teams and great cultures as a way to achieve an advantage over your competitors.

 

A remark by David Grindle got me thinking.  He was talking about Webb Ross’ success three years ago as the Legal Personnel Employer of Choice – and he remarked that the challenge has been not so much achievement of that award, but sustaining the same level of excellence over time.

This is a common scenario – and I’m thinking generally now, not about David or his firm and not even about this Business Owners Forum topic.  I’m talking about the world of difference between reaching upwards and achieving excellence – and the continued act of sustaining that achievement.  It’s all very well achieving excellence, but really the objective must be to sustain it month in and month out – and year in, year out.  And to continue pushing forward.  Because yesterday’s excellence soon becomes today’s mediocrity.

That requires a completely different mindset to the one-off supreme effort of breaking through to a new level.  And the sustained result elicits a completely different sense of achievement to the endorphin-rich buzz of a one-off achievement. 

This is something we talk about often at our weekly directors’ meetings here at Elevate CA.  We opened our doors just over a year ago – and we have ridden a wave of near euphoria with huge support from just about every quarter of the local business community.  We are new, we are energetic – and we are different to the establishment accounting profession.  The positive energy and massive goodwill is still flowing 15 months after we opened the doors, but how long will the honeymoon last?  Will we begin to fade into mediocrity?  Has that already started to happen?  How do we keep ourselves and our business fresh and exciting indefinitely?

This is not just about Elevate CA.  The questions I’m pondering are more general:  You can’t bottle creative energy – but can you systemize it?  Or does any attempt to do so serve only to stifle creativity even more quickly?  How do you keep those around you fired up, buzzing and excited as time goes on?  How do you keep things fresh in the eyes of your clients or customers – and the community at large?  Where is the right balance between putting energy into answering these questions for your business – and putting your head down and generating revenue?

And would anyone be interested in attending a Business Owners Forum event that further explored these very questions?  Let me know.

There will be significant system and accounting issues facing every business with the GST changes taking effect on 1 October.  Maybe it’s time to shift to an online system like Xero? 

Xero is an online accounting system that gives you – and us – easy access to your transactions and reports from your PC, Mac, i-phone or Blackberry from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Some other advantages of an on-line system are these:

Entering journals to reconcile your system with our end of year financial statements will be a thing of the past as we can work directly on your ledger directly through our browser. Even while you or your staff are logged in and working on your data file.

An on-line accounting system also eliminates the need for you to back up your accounting data as everything is securely stored in a data centre rather than on your server.

Using an online accounting system means you will be well prepared for the GST change on 1 October as the upgrades will occur automatically without the need for you to purchase and install an upgrade to your existing software. In fact updates will be a thing of the past entirely as all enhancements and upgrades are taken care of. This is increasingly an advantage with upcoming changes to business tax as announced by the IRD in May.

“Making Tax Easier” is the IRD’s new initiative to transform a predominately paper based process to one which is entirely electronic. The IRD’s goal is that all businesses and individuals will be required to submit their tax information electronically, either by themselves, or through an agent.

For most businesses, the cost of Xero is around $40 per month on a subscription basis. There is no need to purchase additional software to install onto your server. We have the opportunity to become a Xero Certified Partner, which we will do if we have enough support from our clients. Let us know if you’re interested in exploring this further.

On-line products such as Xero seem to us to be the way of the future. If you’d like to explore Xero, we can introduce you and have you up and running in no time – and ensure you are ready to go to file your 30 September returns and be prepared for 1 October.