Reviews :: Thinking Home Business

A post of mine back in mid-October, Tips for Home Based Business and a New Book, was inspired by an interview I’d caught on breakfast television. One of the people interviewed was Sam Leader, a co-author of the book I’m reviewing here. I’ve been meaning to review it ever since then, especially as Sam was kind enough, after reading my blog post, to send me a complimentary, autographed copy of the book (that’s taken care of the transparency bit – oh, and I’ve also been invited to submit some articles for their website – I think that covers it).

In Flying Solo, How to go it alone in business, Robert Gerrish and Sam Leader have produced an amazingly concentrated and at the same time very readable compendium of advice, wise counsel, tips and hints for what they call ‘the soloist’.

Having spent a lot of time around the arts world, I tend to immediately think of a ‘soloist’ as the person in a choir or orchestra who gets to perform solo pieces. Robert and Sam re-define the term and hazard a prediction that a day will come when the musical meaning will take second place and the dictionary definition will read:

soloist n. 1. an individual who runs their own enterprise. 2. a performer of a solo, esp. in music.

and above it will appear

soloism n. a system of individual enterprises run by individuals

The authors then provide a neat list of the features by which you can identify business soloists:

They are self-employed.

They mostly work alone, although occasionally in a partnership or small team.

Their income is reliant on their capacity to make it.

Their past experiences contribute in some way to their current direction.

They go on to identify two categories of soloist: the independent professional and the micro or small business owner.

Another set of distinctions I found particularly illuminating was the categorization of soloists as:

Born soloists

Soloists by Design

Accidental Soloists

Circumstantial Soloists

Hmmm, which am I? Soloist by Design, but with a touch of the Circumstantial, I would say.

These are just a few examples of the distinctions and thought-provoking lists in this book.

The book’s eight chapters are neatly divided into three sections:

Thinking Solo

Acting Solo

Staying Solo

The section on Thinking Solo is really valuable. The authors make it very clear that anyone going solo needs to understand just what they are doing and how this way of doing business will clash with a lot of old assumptions among friends and acquaintances, and even with conditioned thinking in the budding soloist’s own worldview, potentially sabotaging the soloist’s dreams of success. Examples include:

You’ll only be productive if you work long hours

Most small businesses end quickly in financial ruin

It is important to wear a suit to work

This first section includes an excellent workout, the Change Your Thinking Makeover, which is in itself truly worth the price of the book – and more (that phrase sounds such a cliché, but just this one item really is an excellent self-coaching tool among many excellent resources).

As someone who coaches people on, among other things, creating an empowering vision,. I always feel there are special challenges for a home based business owner or other soloist to be able to have and “own” a truly big vision which is also grounded in reality. As in “How can I really develop a vision of a successful, lucrative international business from the modesty of my home office?”. So I was truly impressed with the clarity and practicality of the chapter on The Power of Vision.

There is also practical advice on developing a game plan and especially on gathering a support team. As the authors point out very clearly, flying solo does not mean you don’t need help and support! Far from it.

Marketing – or as the chapter heading in this book puts it – “spreading the word” is something we all have a bit of knowledge about these days. And no doubt we all have our own theories about what works for us and what doesn’t. There is good, practical advice here on developing an ‘elevator statement’ and on developing referrals.

At this point was thinking, this is great stuff, can there be more? So I flipped through the book (I re-read it carefully later ) and realised that the answer was decidedly yes, there is more - and then came to the bibliography. Aha! Now I could see that one of the reasons I’m liking this book is that Robert and Sam read good books and have incorporated seamlessly into this one the thinking of several leaders who have very much influenced my thinking about personal growth, business and marketing, outstanding thought leaders like Stephen Covey, Jim Collins, Timothy Gallwey (one of my absolute favourites for his The Inner Game of Tennis), Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell and Ricardo Semmler.

These latter parts of the book, that I re-read after skimming, include lots of very helpful material about how to work on your business and how to stay on track.

All in all, this is an excellent book for the solo professional or business owner or for anyone thinking about going solo. At this time of gift-giving, or for a birthday, it would be a very good item to wrap nicely and give to a friend or family member who is a soloist or contemplating being one.

It is written in a friendly, almost chatty style and given the seriousness of the content has an amazing lightness of touch. At the same time, the book pulls no punches about the challenges of going solo and the long term discipline required to make it work well. Of course, it also mentions the rewards. But if someone is not really cut out for going solo, or not ready to make the necessary commitments, this book will explain why they need to do some more thinking and will help them make a decision to work in a corporate or other group environment, if that is going to be more suited to their values, talents and preferences.

Did I agree with everything in the book as the best possible approach on the planet? Hardly. We coaches are in my experience a fairly opinionated bunch and we all have our favourite theories about how best to do things like creating visions, developing a strategic plan, marketing our services and so on. But I believe that any group of professional coaches who are used to working with soloists would acknowledge that the advice here is highly professional and appropriate – all sound and much of it brilliant.I will certainly be pleased to recommend this book to clients, colleagues and friends.

Did I feel warm and fuzzy reading the book? No. Actually, to be really honest there were a couple of times, when Robert and Sam were being hard-hitting (in a friendly sort of way, you understand) and I thought – this is all too hard, what am I doing trying to be a solo entrepreneur? I’ll never be able to do all these things or be this disciplined! Then I pulled myself together (or pulled out of a nosedive, you might say) and thought, hang on, I am doing it and have been doing it for seventeen years, so maybe I’m doing some things right. My next thought was, isn’t it great that I now have this compendium of information, ideas, tips and tools to enable me to fly higher?!

So no, not always an easy read, because it can make you uncomfortable – but we all know about comfort zones and how they can limit us, don’t we?

Thank you, Robert and Sam – an excellent contribution to the world and work of us soloists (cue sound of – solo – trumpet and – solo – drumroll).

And to help with staying on your flight path, there is the flyingsolo website with loads of helpful information and inspiration.

I’ve written previously about my decision to go with Blogware and specifically with BlogHarbor – see Blogware Trial Going Well.

In a discussion group I belong to there’s been a thread running on blogging, or more specifically on what blogging tool, service or platform, as in Typepad, Blogger, Blogware, BlogHarbor, WordPress etc, is ‘best’. I joined in and offered some thoughts. Various people pitched firmly for the service they preferred. Which prompted this blog, to bring my thoughts on the matter up to date.

Maybe that conversation on the forum is a bit like having a conversation about which brand or type of motor vehicle is ‘best’. Someone who needs a pickup truck, or as we say in Australia a utility or ‘ute’, will not be interested in a sedan. But I’m sure there are people who, like me, want to have a professional looking blog without having to become an expert in coding, and who want intelligent, responsive support and all at a manageable price. Those were the key factors in my choosing Blogware as delivered by BlogHarbor.

Whether others choose BlogHarbor or not won’t affect me. My hope is that this review will be seen by people who, like me, have been frustrated by some of the options and that the review will help them shorten the learning curve and enable them to move faster to blogging regularly and happily, without having to worry too much about learning and managing the tools or the platform.

Unlike some others whose comments I’ve read, on the web and in forums, about the competing merits of different blogging platforms, I am not a techie or a programmer, even on an amateur basis. And unlike some of my colleagues I do not get much joy out of tinkering with the software: I find it an unsatisfying and often unproductive use of my time. My desire has been and is to have a blogging system that works for me immediately, and works the way my word processing software works for me, i.e. without my having to think about it. And I want a system that I can be pretty sure I will still be using in 2 or 3 years time.

I’ve been blogging now for one and three quarter years and I’ve tried a lot of blogging platforms, including ones where I really tried to learn and apply, but without much success, what I had been assured were ‘easy’ programming skills.

I wrote about all this as guest blogger on Andy Wibbels’ Easy Bake Weblogs – see Blogging Platform Junkie ‘Fesses Up - and the one I wrote shortly after – Blogging Platform Junkie Settles Down – the latter one being basically about the fact that I chose BlogHarbor. BlogHarbor uses the Blogware technology and adds a truly impressive and personal support to that, at a very reasonable price. And there are amazingly good stats, much more informative than Typepad (which is in itself an excellent platform but for me has serious limitations).

Blogger? Well, it’s free, which is a good price. And you can’t complain if it doesn’t work for you, can you?

I have to say that I have found, through very time consuming and often deeply frustrating experience, that a number of people who recommend different platforms assume that the world shares their knowledge base – “Doesn’t everyone know how to handle CSS, PHP (insert your bit of techie jargon/acronym)? It’s so easy!” Well, no.

And some people love WordPress, and have told me it’s “really easy” – for me, it ain’t.

Another BlogHarbor user, who was very helpful to me when I was trying to make up my mind, is T L Pakii Pierce, who has a very informative blog at How to Blog for Fun and Profit! - he’s so helpful I thought he must be a coach and then I found out he is! In a podcast he has on site (and he explains podcasts!) he comments on Blogger and he also makes a very good point (among several very good points), which is that if you are blogging for business it is worth making a very good decision about the right platform or software for you at an early stage, because there is a cost in switching. For example, I have a Google Page Ranking (PR) of 3/10, which is nice, on my Typepad-based site - Original Thinking Home Business - but I have better visitor stats on this new one at BlogHarbor. I would love to be able to switch the page rank to this new site but I can’t and I’m not updating the one that has the good ranking. I was effectively mirroring the sites for a while – duplicating the content – but I’m told that could be counter-productive with Google, and anyway it’s time consuming and inconvenient to do the mirroring exercise. So in effect, for a longer term benefit I am giving up an existing asset.

That’s all part of the learning process I’ve had to go through, and I agree absolutely with my colleague Andy Wibbels when he encourages people to get started with something, but just get started. Andy recommends Typepad, for a lot of good reasons, and he uses Typepad as the basic tool for his excellent blogging course.

Nevertheless, I have to say that from my point of view BlogHarbor delivers all that Typepad does and more, and at a competitive price. And from my hard-won experience I am convinced that it’s a smart idea to move as quickly as you can to set up on the platform that delivers the service you want for the longer haul, assuming you have some idea what you want to do or achieve with your blog. When people as smart and as experienced as T L Pakii Pierce and Kathleen Gilroy choose Blogware as their preferred platform, I feel reassured. And both Thomas and Kathleen evidently have the programming skills to have a much wider choice of platforms than I do. Kathleen’s comparison of Typepad and Blogware was a boon to me in my investigative phase.

There will always be people who will want different functionality or features from whatever product one or other person recommends, which is fine. What I’m saying in this review, in case it’s not clear by now, is that with the benefit of a lot of testing of other platforms and the perspective of a non-technical person looking for a robust and well featured business blogging tool, I am personally happy with Blogware, as delivered by BlogHarbor, and I have no hesitation recommending it.

For anyone who has tried any of the blogging solutions, BlogHarbor might look a little daunting at first, but that’s because there are so many features. I just treat the control panel a bit like the dashboard of a new car – lots of features and I’ll get around to them but first I’ll drive it. For example, I’d been using the service for a few weeks before I found the tab for statistics and was amazed at the extent and precision of the stats.

Just as with Blogger or Typepad, you can be up and running with BlogHarbor in fifteen minutes and then you can customise it progressively. There are excellent templates and in my view more customisable options and easier to use than for Typepad.

With Typepad and Blogger, I never really worked out how to use my own domain name for my blog. With BlogHarbor it was extremely easy and fast.

One of the particularly attractive features for newbies and experienced bloggers alike is that you can check out BlogHarbor for a month without paying. And yes, that means without handing over your credit card details, with the risk that is seen by many to entail. But in fact I had only used BlogHarbor for about a week before I upgraded to the paid version, so that I could use my own domain straight away.

Blogware through BlogHarbor also meets a desired requirement of mine, to combine most of what I want from a website with the features of a blog. In that respect, the BlogHarbor solution looks like a great basis for a sophisticated, responsive knowledge management system.

Of course there are quirks, as with any template based product, and there are still some things I’m trying to figure out. But so far I’ve been able to do most of the things I want to do, like putting ads and affiliate links onsite for some products I’m recommending – anathema to some bloggers, I know, but hey! I’m in blogging for business as well as fun.

Blogware is sold through resellers/distributors who provide the backup service. I did spend some hours checking out the various resellers of Blogware. My first choice of a reseller looked promising because it seemed that there was a real live human being running that and I thought there was a users’ forum. But I found that the support was not to my liking and the forum not functioning. That’s when I got onto BlogHarbor, through T L Pakii Pierce’s recommendation. And I found that not only is there a more up to date manual onsite than I’d seen previously, and a functioning forum actively managed by the BlogHarbor man, John Keegan, but that John is very quick to respond to support questions and is very clear and helpful in his responses.

BlogHarbor with Blogware gets top marks from me.