Reflections of an Entrepreneur

It was nice to read a nice feedback in our support system today because people who contact our support team are usually those with problems or questions.

We do get frequent ‘thank you’ for our assistance and we do appreciate the gestures of thanks, but rarely do happy customers contact us as follows:

He may have described his e-mail as ‘little’ but it’s the e-mails like these that make us feel that all of our hard work has come to some good. Thank you Mr Saw!

I’ll make this short as there are several chunks of stuff to be completed before I fly back to Paris on Thursday and the massive headache is not helping. ERP softwares are absolute necessities in any business and I cannot imagine any business that has hopes of doing anything decent not using one.

Intuit recently released QuickBooks Simple Start 2008 for free in their bid to compete with the free web-based softwares popping up every other day and Microsoft’s Office Accounting Express. There is simply no excuse for entrepreneurs not to use an accounting system anymore. The $100 barrier that kept small companies in their warm stone age comfort of Excel or paper based accounting is no longer an excuse.

I’ve been a great fan of Quickbooks Premier since the early days of iStyles (then iPodStyles) because of the extensive range of features and simplicity of use where an accounting degree is not required to create an invoice, unlike some of the other alternatives available. We’ve since migrated all our systems to SAP BusinessOne for more robust database performance and features that our business needed as we grew, but QuickBooks will always be remembered fondly.

If you’re running a small business and using your good old excel sheets, go grab the new Quickbooks now. You’ll never regret the step and will look back wondering how you ever survived without it. If you handle inventory and want more capabilities, look at the other members of the QuickBook family. Either way, you will need a basic accounting software at the very least and QuickBooks is probably the best way to start.

I’ve never been one for social networking in the past simply because of the ill-conceived notion that such activities were for the younger generation to fill the void of what would otherwise be real world relationships. It was only recently that I gradually embraced social networking, rather late for someone who loves to live on the cutting edge of technology, and am gradually discovering the advantages and disadvantages of such a networking medium. Sure, I was on Friendster many years back when it was cool to sign up and add friends but I’ve not touched that account for years.

Social networking is part of what is otherwise known as Web 2.0, the explosion of user generated content, a massive topic where long dissertations can be written about, whether be it about the intelligence of the masses or about the amount of crap out there, but I’ll just focus my thoughts on the networking component for now. How effective is social networking for an entrepreneur?

After dabbling in Facebook and more recently, Linked In, for the past week or two, I can safely conclude that networking on Facebook will be of little value and may not be worth the time and effort in growing relationships if the sole purpose is only for the business. I am however a little hooked because the platform has enabled me to keep in touch with all the friends I had in the past. Without such a platform, it would have been impossible to track where everyone went or even to communicate with them.

I am pretty new to Linked In and will hold my reservations till later, but I’ve thus far been pretty impressed by the implementation of the service and the possibilities that it holds for businesses in the search for partners and employees.

Business owners explore new technologies to determine how these can be used to grow their businesses. The participation in social networking is not going to bring about any significant or even tangible benefits to a business in terms of sales or growth but the links can be useful in the search for a new employee with a good fit in the organization. The secret to business growth is not in the participation of web 2.0 services, but in the creation of tools to facilitate the grown of the community and their contributions, to facilitate web 2.0 - this is till we reach web 3.0 where we have a semantic web of machines that interact with each other intelligently and grow. Painful lessons learnt from my previous work on Hayek’s theory of artificial intelligence evolution in an economy of agents may actually come in useful after all.

An accountant from another firm once told me that “Anyone can do accounting” and this is about as far away from the “truth” as the flatness of the world. I like to think of myself as someone with a pretty decent intelligence and comprehension skills but accounting is something that makes that big vein in my head double in size and causes my head to spin faster than, well.. nothing comes close to making my head spin in this way.

“Anyone can do accounting”? Yah right, as I limped away from today’s two hours meeting with my accountant, shaking a little, but trying hard not to let it look obvious. This big A hurts me even more than parallel computing and artificial intelligence algorithms put together!

A word of advice to all entrepreneurs out there running sole-proprietorships or partnerships – do not convert your company to a private limited unless you have a very compelling reason to do so. Please do not do it just for the sake of the pretty “private limited” in the company name or you will be in for a very rude shock when the administrative overheads kick in.

Of course, if the company starts off small, with a small number of transactions, adjusting to the accounting requirements will be less painful and doing so gradually will be a good way to gain familiarity with the system, but iStyles unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) started with this big giant rolling ball that was passed on from ObjectsFusion. As with all big giant rolling balls, this one picked up little bits of dust, grime and moss over the years. Matters were further complicated by the migration from QuickBooks Premier to SAP BusinessOne in the second half of the year.

A solid ERP platform will be an absolute necessity but even that alone will not be sufficient to cover all angles. An accountant will be necessary.

iStyles Pte. Ltd. was previously ObjectsFusion, a sole-proprietorship that existed since July 2004. We ceased ObjectsFusion and started a private limited company with a sole purpose – to qualify for a Verisign merchant account. Despite the merchant fees of two thousand odd yearly, a merchant account will work out to substantial cost savings for us, compared to existing methods at the current transaction volume, and even more so as the business expands. In addition, a merchant account will potentially improve sales by radically simplifying the checkout and payment process on our store.

The acquisition of a merchant account as a Singapore business does not come about easily as it is strictly available only to private limited companies with a paid up capital of more than S$100k, unlike the case in other countries where a merchant account can be acquired with barely more than a corporate banking account, social security number and company registration number. A quick glance at our statements shows that we may be able to put in a paid up capital of S$100k but I’ll only be able to verify this after the statements are compiled.

Not everyone can do accounting and I sincerely thank Su Yen for her patience in working with me.

Customer support is the dark mystical art that some companies tolerate, hate or simply ignore, but what makes this subject so frightening to companies? Is it really that dark and mystical? The solutions lie not just within the customer support department but in almost every other department in a company.

Customer support does not start and end with the customer support department. Having fantastic customer support does not ensure a satisfied customer as customer satisfaction is based on his or her perceived level of satisfaction in the usage of a company’s service, which in turn determines whether his or her expectations were met.

It’s all about managing expectations. A company has achieved perfect customer support when it receives zero customer issues to support. Of course, this is impossible in the real world and some of you may even be wondering what I’m drinking (a yummy 2004 bottle of “grand vin” from Chateau Petit-Village in the Pomerol region of France by the way) as I write this article, but just think about it - customer support issues are nothing more than a failure of the other department to perform their duties.

For example, if a customer is frustrated to learn that his order has still not arrived after five days, it’s due to the failure of the IT, content and/or sales department to present the facts clearly that orders shipped via xxx service will take between 6 to 12 days. If a product has mechanical flaws that result in constant failures and support issues, it’s a failure of the hardware engineering team. If a software is hard to use, has improper documentation or simply does not function well, it’s a failure of the software engineers, UI designer or documentation officer.

Resolving all these issues in the other departments is of course easier said then done but it is a state of perfection that we constantly strive towards in iStyles.

A company that has zero customer issues in the real world is a company that is not opened for business. Customer support is thus the final line of defense to ensure customer satisfaction and this is a department that must be taken seriously. Customer support is no less important to a company brand or image than the other components.

The customer support on iStyles has thus far been accomplished via e-mails and forum conversations. We’re pretty much focused on being people oriented and our customer support has been constantly praised for its quick and helpful responses. In an effort to enhance and take this step further, we have acquired a license for Kayako’s excellent SupportSuite and have integrated the software into our web platform. The integration has been completed at the back end at [url]http://support.istyles.com[/url] , but we will still have to update the flow of information accordingly for the other support pages, in addition to populating the knowledgebase and troubleshooter so that customers can easily find a solution to any issues they encounter, should they encounter any.

All e-mails sent to us are currently handled by the new system. The public launch will be done at a later stage, once the full integration is complete.