Site upgrade completed
It’s been some time since updates were posted on the site. A new theme has been installed with a cleaner look and with it, Wordpress has been upgraded to 2.5.1 to take advantage of a new dashboard and security.
I’m also taking the opportunity to write up more on our products that have been under development for the past year, O9BMS (Building Management Systems) for Enterprise Mobile Inspections and Broad-Cast.net, an EDM and Corporate E-Card Portal since these products will be primary focus of the company this year.
Undergoing a facelift .. new look coming soon!
The site is currently undergoing some maintenance work to have a new look. The great thing about using a content management system like Wordpress is that the site can continue to function (with a minimal design) even while work is being done.
Updates for 2007 … What’s up for 2008?
It’s been a pretty crazy work schedule the past few months as we juggled projects at IconnectE and K.C DAT since August.
In October, we finally launched Broad-Cast.net as a full service providing email marketing to the SME market. We had been offering the service for customers without a proper name to it so its a good start that we were also engaged by Avocent International Pte Ltd for their “Avocent Hero” EDM campaigns as well as VivoCity Pte Ltd to assist with their recent 1st year party invites. Also on the email marketing platform, we’ve been hard at work creating a corporate eCard portal for Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd that would allow them to personalize each greeting card that gets sent by the company staff.
In November, Max Cole and On9 Systems got our heads together to plan how we could grow our businesses and in doing so, we migrated our servers to a proper rack with Viewqwest (great support from Boon Hian, Nathan and Thames). Doing this got us nice 2 x Linksys SRW2024 24-Port 10/100/1000 Gigabit Switch. It has some great features like bandwidth monitoring and throttling (a very neat feature!). Mike Veltman and Robert Roach are serious dudes into security and I’m glad to be working with them on this as we get serious about hosting. By offering Virtualization as an option to SMEs, this creates a great platform for us to create some serious applications for companies.
With December creeping into its second week and 2008 looming, our pipeline is full till the first quarter where we’ll be doing a major project utilizing Drupal as well as another project for a B2B Art Rental Store coming up too. I’m glad we’re getting a good start into 2008!
ProjectPier.org, a fork from activeCollab
Since activeCollab has announced their pricing strategy with $399 for the corp edition, I’ve decided to look for alternatives. Happened to come across ProjectPier that is a fork from activeCollab 0.71 which we’re currently using. Atm, the 0.71 code fits nicely into what we require and so shall look forward to ProjectPier’s updates. Need to do some migration work for this.
Are you ready for word-of-mouth marketing?
Imagine an organization with a proven system for 24 years, over 100,000 members worldwide in more than 37 countries, who can assist you in growing your business and open new doors to global opportunities. Raffles Chapter would like to invite you to our Visitor’s Day on 21st Sept 2007. For more details, view the slideshow below or contact me today!
On9 Systems - Blogs for Business
Received a SMS on Wednesday from a fellow BNI member that she couldn’t attend this morning’s breakfast meeting and if I minded switching over. I readily agreed before remembering that my slide desk was skewed towards customers to have an overview of the company. Spent about 3-4 hours last night improving a 4 slide version I had previously used in my flip-chart presentaton and here’s the results
Presented by 字 Concepts
activeCollab gets a facelift with 1.0 nearing release
Have been giving activeCollab 0.71 a good workout with the current projects and while there are some quirks as compared to using WebCollab, I would say its a great transition to make project management easier. Noticed that the activeCollab site got a long overdue upgrade and hope to see the 1.0 release soon!
Growing a small business with baby steps
Was listening to Dave Ramsey’s podcast as I was moving around Singapore for customer site visits. A guy (who ran a one man consulting firm) called in to comment that he wanted to grow his business but didn’t want to walk the traditonal path of hiring a employee but instead was looking at bring on a partner. Dave gave some great advice that seemed quite logical and useful to me at the time. However, I had forgotten to make a note of the exact details and wound up fast-forwarding a few days of material before remembering it was from 1st August.
The reason why I wanted to listen again to the details was because I too didn’t want to hire just another employee as I find myself needing to grow the business. Dave’s rationale is that he hires team members while still holding 100% ownership. While not the tradtional X% shared ownership like partners, I think this is a better model for me to adopt.
The reasoning goes (figures are for example only)
If I’m making $60K, hiring an employee would most likely have to be supported by this revenue and creates a cash flow issue. The better case would be to look for someone who is willing to fight and strive to earn his own keep while at the same time looking to grow the business as much as possible since its to his benefit.
A likely scenario would be to base his output based on past experience. E.g. His target would be $40k and most importantly, he would receive a high percentage of this (e.g.80% with 20% back to the company). This way, there is an incentive for the team member to work harder and of course earn even more versus a fixed salary income that grows slowly. However, Dave also mentioned that this arrangement is best set in a fixed period of say about 3 months to a year to ensure flexibility in adjusting the allocation since the aim is really more to ensure fairness.
With this in mind, it looks set for another person to join the team. Details soon 
Take action for your Business today!
Attended my first meeting at BNI-Raffles as an official member today. Almost couldn’t wake up after working on the migration of SportsKaki’s site to our servers but in the end managed to get into Geek Terminal right on time. I’m usually not a morning person but somehow meeting up at BNI always give me a buzz that lasts right throughout the business day.
We had a great session today with our mentor Leonard Song from Business Oasis International giving a great motivational speech on the key elements to a successful chapter. He concentrated on 3 main points, 1) OWNERSHIP, 2) TEAMWORK and lastly 3) TAKING ACTION!
1) OWNERSHIP
Leonard reminded us that being business owners, we are truly the only people who can take control of how we want to grow our own company. This also applies to how we want to grow the chapter. Having this mindset will help to cultivate the right approach by showing commitment to the team
2) TEAMWORK
An example that was brought up that stuck particularly with me was that geese fly in a V-formation to reduce drag and fly more efficiently. Similarly in a team, by working together, we will grow faster and better. We were also reminded that the guy (top bird) in front has a tough job and showing support is always a good thing.
3) TAKING ACTION!
The last point was that we should all take action to improve or examine how we do things now and make sure each member knew what the other was doing. The power of word-of-mouth marketing and referrals is that by engaging our members on what we do and similarly learning what the other party offers, we can start connecting opportunities in our daily work.
A good example was how immediately after the meeting, Kelly from Power Laser International dropped me a mail titled “How to find the right referral for Power Laser?“. I was immediately intrigued and read through the details. Some key points about Power Laser that immediately gets stuck in my mind for customers with office supplies needs.
- cost saving on cartridges without compromising on the print quality
- enjoy unlimited on-site printer maintenance and servicing
- enjoy free part replacement for printer
- enjoy free temporary printer loan to tie over the downtime
I look forward to putting the 3 points into action and getting to know each member of Raffles Chapter better. Ang from Bio Life Marketing gave a great quote to end the meeting.
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. - Henry Ford
Moving from WebCollab to activeCollab for project management
Project and tasks management is very important to small teams so having a web based tool that can allow all members (including clients) to have an overview of what are the milestones and tasks as well as a central repository of documents helps a lot. Had been using WebCollab for the past 3 years and while I’ve found it to be quite sufficient for my needs, customers often complain that it isn’t the most user-friendly tool.
Seeing as how BaseCamp has been wildly successful in its attempt to be a project management tool for the masses, I thought I would try it too. However, the costs associated with it on a monthly basis isn’t the most attractive option.
Thinking I would have stick to WebCollab and its green/red tasks indicators, I’m glad I came upon RedMine and spent quite a few hours getting the CentOS + Plesk 8.1 server ready for Ruby. However, after spending some time with it, I realise although its a great project planning tool, it seems more suited for developers rather than end-customers.
Again I went searching until activeCollab came up during my Google Reader scans. This time the requirement for PHP5 gave me a little problem since Linux server is still on PHP4. Luckily Windows server is able to toggle between PHP4 and 5 and I managed to get it installed and tested out creating projects and clients. It has a straightforward interface that allows for creating of projects, assigning clients to it as well as milestones (deadlines) with its associated tasks list. Looks like I’ll soon be migrating all the projects currently being managed to activeCollab since it looks simple enough for end-users to use too.
