Answer Guy Central

Today, a tweet caught my attention. The question, posed by Anita Campbell, was whether the existence of services like LegalZoom caused more people to incorporate their small businesses.

The answer is no.

Ms. Campbell links to a story on her own web site that appears to say otherwise. But growth notwithstanding, services very much like LegalZoom have existed for years, are as easy to use, and cost (and have cost) about the same amount. So, once again: no, more people are not incorporating “because of LegalZoom”.

More small businesses are incorporating because it’s the right way to do things. The best business change is one where that change causes something important to happen, and incorporation creates new ways of managing finances, clearer rules for tax deductions, a layer of protection for personal assets that sole proprietors don’t have, and a more professional image.

As our economy changes and an ever-greater number of people are self-employed, a better understanding of “the rules” is a natural progression. That understanding is by no means universal, but it is progressive. Incorporating makes sense. And it’s easy; we’ll even do it for you here at Answer Guy Central!

What the Internet has added to this discussion is greater access to the information behind the idea, and LegalZoom (and others), in sharing this information as part of their long tail marketing plans, are not the cause of anything. They are, however, acting as catalysts for your business change . . . by creating their own.

How are you creating business change?

Where do you get your business computer support? You should get it from either PC-VIP or The Computer Answer Guy, but because our two stellar support options—great as they are—each serve specific groups, you’re forgiven if you use someone else.

If you use Barrister Global Services, though, this blogger doesn’t forgive you at all. And maybe he has a point. Or maybe not. Consider:

It’s a longstanding practice in the business world to offer customers a discount to pay their bills early. Actually, it was a longstanding practice, but if you’re under 35 years old you may never have seen an invoice that said “2/10 Net 30“. By offering customers a 2% discount if they pay their bills in 10 days, you’re really trying to avoid the other end of the spectrum; some customers take way longer than the 30 days you’re actually asking to be paid in.

It seems Barrister has initiated a new scheme to hold onto their money, and it’s the reverse of what I’ve described: they offer their contractors a price to do work, and then tell them that they’ll pay them faster if they take less. And at 20% it’s a lot less, especially considering that the hurry-up being offered is only a few days.

But is there anything wrong with this?

Frankly, I don’t think so. It preys on Barrister’s less-educated contractors, of course, in exactly the same way that H&R Block offering you an instant tax refund so you don’t have to wait a couple of weeks for IRS processing preys on people who need cash fast at almost any cost.

And really, it raises the question of how smart the people Barrister hires are if they’ll take such a deal.

But if you can offer customers a discount to pay on time, why not also offer contractors faster payment in exchange for a discount?

Happy New Year. There’s some real business change to start the year off right.

Is your web site yours? Does anyone disagree? Is your business change, business practice, or any other part of your business REALLY yours?

How do you know?

I was working on a few domain transfers this week for a client. And it wasn’t fun. There’s a process in place for doing this that’s supposed to protect everyone, and when it works it does its job wonderfully. When it doesn’t, though, business change becomes business impossible. And the clock is running, both on the client’s business change choices and on my “meter”.

I got through it, because making business change happen is what I DO. But not without some pain. I may write about this in detail some time, because having a road map of someone else’s pain is the kind of thing people can benefit from.

Here’s another: this, as well as the issue of communicating in a way that doesn’t infringe someone else’s rights, could come in handy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation talks here about the latter. Unless you’d prefer to hire a few lawyers it’s an important read.

Nothing about the work I was doing today or what’s in that document should be too much of a surprise. But it’s real. It stands in the way of doing business or changing your business. It’s what Business CHANGE means.

It’s a topic that continues to fascinate me: When does talking about yourself become SPAM?

I purposely pose the question using those exact words, and start by acknowledging all the smart people whose answer is that one should never talk about yourself because it’s (fill in your favorite disparaging words here).

But on the Internet, everything business-related is about self promotion. I believe that most people accept that idea, just as they accept that when you write a book you do a book tour and when you have a movie coming out you go on Letterman, Leno, O’Brien, and anywhere else that will have you.

Earlier this week I commented on a video. I thought the video was funny and entertaining, and I also thought it spoke to what we do here: at Answerguy Central, we teach our clients how to cope with change. So I included a link back to this blog, and got a pretty good amount of traffic from that link.

And then someone yelled at me.

Well boo-hoo. My skin isn’t so thin that I cared about that part, but it did make me think, yet again, about what SPAM actually is. Then I saw a piece talking about some changes in the way the Digg.com would be handling the information that users post, and I commented. And yes, my comment includes a link back to here, as well as a link to the information I was describing above.

Go ahead: read backward starting here.

So what is SPAM? If I sent out e-mails to people who haven’t asked to hear from me (notice I didn’t say “don’t want to hear from me”), then in commonly-accepted Internet terms I’ve spammed. But imagine you were in a discussion with a dozen people at a party, gave your opinion of the subject at hand, and then mentioned that you have some expertise. Isn’t that how people do business every day?

Or is this a whole new kind of change?