A previous comment on setting up a less expensive operation in Vancouver prompted more than a few folk to tell me how lucky I was to have a firm that could easily move anywhere. I thought that the comments deserved to be answered because we’re all in the same [currently awfully leaky] boat.

Some bright person once said genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. I am no genius, but I do perspire a lot! My primary business until recently has been presenting seminars to [and doing consulting for] owners of smaller businesses. That consulting has ranged from marketing and sales [great], via screwing banks [fun], to bailing out business collapses [dreadfully distressing].

Both of these activities demand lots of physical presence. Not exactly a good recipe for portability. Last year, while in Australia for a while, I decided that my entire income should come from net-based activities - by the end of this year. That meant a complete and radical change to both the products and the way of doing business. The thought of such a radical change scared me witless, but everything I was reading pointed in this direction. If I can do it, then so can you.

In my experience, the reason most businesses fail is simple – they don’t know where they’re going. They have no direction or focus, which means that they are at the mercy of every new idea or fad that comes along. And there doesn’t seem to be too much of a shortage of those right now. I can’t recall when last I saw so many get-rich-quick schemes doing the rounds. It seems as though I get asked to evaluate a new one every day. I tend to apply a simple rule of thumb – why are you giving me so much money? That inspires a bunch of analytical questions that inevitably blow the concept out of the water for me.

Back to the subject at hand – how to make your business portable. Probably the hardest thing to do is analyse exactly what it is that you do. Where [or what] is the core activity that makes you money? I ask this because your real value comes from your clients – not from anything else. Not from the staff. Not from the product. Not from the production or the process. Your clients part with their money because they buy solutions from you. Which means that most of our businesses can be boiled down to a simple, single thing that we offer. If that’s the case, how can we help our clients even more by offering that simple, single thing electronically? And if they aren’t electronic, how else can we offer it, or who else do we offer it to? How do we take the radical step of ‘discarding’ those who prefer to stay in the 19th century?

Please don’t take me to task on this. I know that every business owner needs services – but if that business owner refuses to buy into modern communications methods [email and the internet] then I can’t help him. Early last year, one of my decisions was that I would seek only clients who had email and internet access. Please don’t think that’s arrogant – it’s simply a statement of direction and a definition of my market. [Yes, it cuts out a huge potential market – but in turn that has opened a huge international market.]

Once I determined whom I wanted to work with, the next challenge lay in communicating with you. Initially I used a simple, yet powerful, contact management product – Maximizer - that allowed me to generate mass emails without all the addresses in the header. This worked well until the list grew to more than 2000 readers, at which point it became too cumbersome.

List administration [subscribing and unsubscribing] began to take up too many hours, and it simply began to take too long to send the emails from my PC to my ISP. [2000 emails of 20KB each is 40MB – which takes a while to upload as the upload speed is usually only 33KB/sec – even with a 56K modem.] At this point I started using a list server in the USA – Sparklist. They keep track of subscriptions and unsubscriptions automatically, and I now send just a single email to them - which they instantly distribute to you. Since my email access is often via my cell phone at 9.6KB/sec you will understand how useful this is. [This weeks email distribution will be about 450MB!]

None of these developments would have occurred if I hadn’t focused on solving my problems with the single goal of developing a portable business. I don’t know what your specific business is, or how you can make yourself (or the business) portable – but I bet you can! [Actually, that’s a little deceptive because in it’s pure essence your business is to make money.] The specifics of how you choose to do that are the result of your personal history, experience, and interests.] Which means that your business is anything that makes you money.

You aren’t married to your job specification. Change that specification if you want to make yourself portable. My last word on portability: If you’re paranoid, you’re immediately going to discard the idea because you think you won’t ever leave SA. This issue is not about moving out of SA – it’s about adding value to yourself and your business. It’s about adding options to your life.

A portable business is more responsive to any changes; is much easier to move; is much easier to sell; and is much less stressful.

Much of my thinking on this issue was inspired by The Sovereign Individual [a 1997 book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson] which I read in late 1998. Lots of very interesting ideas and thoughts - but the one that really tickled my fancy was the thought that governments would have to start treating their citizens like clients - or risk losing them to other governments! If you want to get a copy - click here.

© Peter Carruthers, www.petesweekly.co.za

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