Articles

By Stefan Sojka

The worst experiences can often deliver the best lessons.

Anyone who has been in business for more than a few nanoseconds has likely encountered at least one difficult customer.  Something about certain people and money trips a short circuit in their brain, where logic, decency and empathy get replaced with desperation, anger and a sense of entitlement to the right to be not very nice.  We’ve all seen it – maybe we’ve been it, on occasions.  The customer is always right, right?

In most cases, that maxim works well as a guide to good customer service, but what about those nasty characters, who make it their business to become your business’ worst nightmare?

One reason why large companies pay lawyers small fortunes to write reams of disclaimers is that they are inoculating themselves from bad customers.  Small businesses are not so lucky.  We often risk people walking right through our front doors and creating havoc.

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I set out in small business was to presume that everyone had the same ethics and values as I do.  Of course they are all open, honest, fair, easy-going and like to resolve any misunderstandings amicably.  Yeah, right!

Every small business owner has a story.  I’ve had my fair share.  Clients who refused to pay, just because they didn’t feel like it.  Clients who blamed me because they hired the wrong person to head up their project, then sat back gleefully and watched it implode just so they could unleash their anger at me, the same way they do with all their suppliers.  Then there are those who invest their entire existence into something so that the tiniest issue becomes an utter tragedy, leading to midnight phone calls to sort it out after they’ve polished off two bottles of red.

I can laugh about it now, but these customers took their toll.  I have associates who have faced far worse; threats of violence, screaming, humiliation and huge financial losses, even bankruptcy from unpaid accounts.  Bad customers might be 1 in 100, but that one can ruin everything – at best they can sure suck the fun out of what should be a passionate and joyful pastime, operating a small business.  My worst clients have taught me two things:

There is no obligation to serve every customer who comes along

“We reserve the right to refuse service” is a powerful statement.  Taking on the wrong customer is simply not worth it.  Even though a budding small business might feel a necessity to take on everything that comes along, the opportunity cost of picking up the wrong client is too high.  Trust me, there are plenty of awesome customers out there.

Recognize the early warning signs.

With hindsight, I should have listened to the alarm bells.  At the first meeting, they told me about a terrible experience they had with a previous supplier (was it the supplier’s fault?).  They wanted me to help them take the world by storm, but they didn’t have any money right now.  There was just something about their demeanor that I knew was dodgy, but I didn’t listen to my instincts, or my wife, when she said, “I don’t like them.  They’re trouble.  Don’t do it”.

I would have preferred to have never had any bad clients, but they sure cured me of my innocence and taught me that I deserve better.  Life is too short.  I want to spend it taking care of all my cool clients who share my values and want a fun, exciting and rewarding ride. Don’t you?

By Stefan Sojka

Don’t throw the real baby out with the virtual bathwater.

There is something about online business that tends to set us up for a huge amount of misaligned expectations.  With everything just one click away, the hidden complexities of Web functionality lead people to believe that it all happens auto-magically.  Some coder just copy-pasted in a few lines of recycled PHP and ‘whammo!’…instant global success story!  I have had people seriously enquire about replicating eBay and/or FaceBook for $5K and honestly believing that should do the trick.

It’s kind of understandable.  Most of the hard work is hidden in scripts and files and thanks to the limitless talent of a planet full of awesome GUI designers, everything looks so slick, clean and simple.  The Internet is the most complex entity in the known Universe, yet its astounding success is due to its belying simplicity.   If it didn’t look and feel easy to use, it would still to this day remain the bastion of computer scientists, hackers and brainiacs.

As a business owner, I still need to contend with the complexities.  If my business model is almost exclusively an online model, such as selling downloadable software, I am going to need a team of coders on hand to manage the high level of sophistication involved; security, functionality, payment, membership management.  Imagine; a Website as deceptively lightweight as Twitter requires 140 employees to keep it running – at a loss!

The big growth area now seems to be hybrid businesses, with one foot in the online space and one foot in the real world.  Think of pizza delivery.  You need a complex online system to manage and process customer orders and an efficient off-line operation to get the pizza to my door within 30 minutes.  Similarly, sites like Groupon rely enormously on the online component delivering deals and getting online exposure to billions of users, but without the real-world participating businesses delivering on those great offers, Groupon’s image could turn sour real fast.

Then there are your businesses that most of us are engaged in, that operate primarily in reality but use the Web to promote products/services and attract new business.  Even the simplest of “brochure-ware” sites need to be created to a high standard to reflect the quality of the business and to have some basic technical expertise applied, even if it is just for contact forms, updating content and measuring the site’s performance.

There is no avoiding the fact that I have to get the technical stuff right.  But what will really make or break the operation is everything else.  If I expect that the code will magically solve all my business problems and make me an overnight squillionaire, it will be at my peril.  Technology alone will not cut it.  Why does software keep on getting upgraded?  Because it will never be perfect.  It’s what we do with it and how we integrate it into our business that counts.

Here’s what I focus on; customer service, communication, quality control, administration systems and processes, accounts, building relationships with valued associates, ensuring (not assuming) that I am on the same page as my customers, diarizing everything, keeping time-sheets, keeping my desk tidy, my files organized, and my inbox manageable.  You know, all the stuff that prevents my life and business from descending into a chaotic nightmare and will only get worse the more things grow.

Every business now must have a layer of technology surrounding it and you have to get the right solutions and systems in place.  But as technology pervades our lives and the lives of our competitors, it’s the fundamentals of off-line business practice that will determine our ultimate success.

By Stefan Sojka

Complacency was once a desirable state of the masses – a place where we could raise families and live nice quiet lives.  Progress was someone else’s problem.  The networked world has pushed us all into the rapids, sink or swim.

Before we all plugged in and turned on, most advancement in society, economics and life in general was pursued by scientists, policy-makers and big business, running their own agendas of discovery, vote-winning or competition.  The rest of the world moved at a fairly steady pace; birth, childhood, school, work, marriage, procreation, retirement, death.  Our ambitions were modest, our scope narrow and our acceptance of our position in the scheme of things was never an issue.

One forgets how recent the global travel phenomenon is, or the notion of having more than one vocation (or partner) in a lifetime, mature age university education or reality TV.  All of these activities have opened our eyes to a broader, deeper, richer life (except, perhaps reality TV!)

I would argue, however, that there is an innate part of us that actually likes being complacent, that could spend our entire lives chasing nothing, kicking back and watching the world go by.  It’s the part that yearns for a sea-change and a house-boat.

The irony is that the only way we’ll ever afford a sea-change is if we work real hard.  Yet, we wage an eternal battle against that voice inside that thinks we are already there, sitting pretty.  “I have a Website.  I’m in Google.  I use email and have a fancy smart phone – I’ve made it.  In fact I’ll go on FaceBook and tell everyone how awesome I am.”

How many Websites do you see that haven’t been updated for five years?  News pages with ‘news’ from 2006?  Websites that are still 800 pixels wide, reflecting a screen size standard that has long been superseded?  Coming soon?  Under construction?  Page not found?  Each instance is a shining example of complacency.  Isn’t the Internet supposed to be a revolution in communication and the opportunity of a lifetime to be seized by one and all?  What’s going on?

I am always amazed at how many people’s entire business plan for their Website is to have accidentally managed to get on page one of Google for a couple of good keywords five years ago, or to sit on a pay-per-click campaign they haven’t reviewed since it started.  See the panic set in when a few other Websites start pushing them down the list, or begin bidding against them for paid listings until they drop off the page completely.  Sitting pretty is no way to survive on the Internet.  Getting busy is.

Do I want to be a distant memory, locked away in the deeper recesses of the Web, or an uppermost thought in the world’s collective mind?  I have to stay fresh and keep up to speed.  However well I might think I am doing on-line, I can always do better.  However hard I might be working to stay in front, someone else is working harder, to re-make, re-model and re-invent themselves and their market – my market.

I may not like it, but things are moving very fast.  Everything is feeding back on everything else in an infinite evolutionary loop.  Keep up, or risk being left out of the loop altogether.

I would love to be sitting pretty, but now is not the time.  No house-boat this year.  There’s a lot more kayaking to be done, thrashing about with the paddle, trying not to get overturned, mid-stream.  I’ll have my sea-change… someday.  It certainly won’t happen by itself.

By Stefan Sojka

In this age of information overload, everyone is desperate to push through the crowd to find whatever attention space is left on humanity's virtual Bondi, lay down their digital beach towel and bask in the sun.  I need a good strategy.

It must be the Antarctic chill of winter that’s causing me to think of beach metaphors, or maybe it’s the increasingly icy despondency I’m feeling as I realise that I am a member of a species who now has to compete with billions of others for any recognition and validation, while my biology is programmed to be satisfied with finding a mate, a spot on the beach and perhaps a little respect from the head of the village.

Now, maybe there is very little separating my fingertips from world domination, except perhaps my own incapacity to manipulate the world to my ways.  Surely the entire planet wants to read my blog, laugh at my YouTube videos, buy my stuff and be swayed by my politics?  If only they weren’t all thinking the same thing about themselves!

What makes it so infuriating is how easy it seems for some people to crack it.  That “Evolution of Dance” guy, Mr “Leave Britney Alone” or even such luminaries as Twitter’s Biz Stone or the YouTube creators.  Film yourself doing a stupid dance or build a stupid Website that mimics SMS and the world is your oyster.

I’m starting to work out the secret.  It’s the same secret AC/DC stumbled upon back in the 1970s when the guys first started out.  They’ve continued doing pretty much the same thing for over 35 years.  Keep it simple, and play it loud!  Simplify, then amplify.

Regardless of my field of endeavour, I must refine and perfect it, optimise and distil it to its purest form, to give it the best chance of catching on.  MacDonalds did it with its franchise system, Apple did it with the iPod, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV and Eric Banadinovi? did it with their stage names – in fact, the more I think about it, anything that has struck a chord with the masses and found its day in the sun has this fundamental quality:  a perfect form, able to be repeated, replicated and broadcast.

Even the most complex idea can succeed when its essence is simple and its processes refined.  Man on the moon.  Google.  Sat-Nav.  Word™.
Less mess, more elegance, less instructions, more usability, less clicks, more downloads.  Simplify.  Amplify.

If I am to have half a chance at getting anything to go viral, catch on, hit the charts and make the news, I’ve got to get this right – and so do you.
De-clutter the office and home, avoid anything we know is a waste of time or dead end, then take what we have of value and perfect it.  Make every email, flyer, blog post, press release and domain name more succinct, readable, usable and catchy.  Hire designers to improve aesthetics and other professionals to re-engineer every aspect of what we do, if we can’t do it ourselves.

Learn from nature, the ultimate engineer of efficiency and economy facilitating abundance.  Extreme complexity exists; our grand plans no doubt contain labyrinthine sophistication, but the underlying formulas by which they are created must be forehead-slappingly pure.

Imagine.  I have a dream.  Just do it.  Think different.  Intel inside.  Six Hats.  Linux.  E=mc².  Om.

The universe expanded from a single point.  What’s my point?  If I find it, I’ll go off.  With a bang.

By Stefan Sojka

The Web is increasingly my go-to place for everything; advice, support, intel and inspiration.  Is my traditional bull-dust detector up for the task of discerning what’s good for me?

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times (I can feel a novel coming on... dammit, I’ve only got 500 words!)  The world seems to be plunging ever deeper into chaos and crisis at precisely the same time as mind-boggling scientific breakthroughs are occurring.  Financial, social and economic disasters abound, while the Internet explodes with individuals and orgs purporting to have all the answers.

Pre-Web, there weren’t many people to turn to in times of need.  My solicitor?  Priest?  MP?  GP?  Bank manager?  Now every ‘consultant’, ‘expert’ and ‘coach’ is Twittering and blogging their personal contribution to solving my problems and creating my (their) Utopian future.

The problem Web-based advice and information is that there are a few additional dimensions that affect both the advice itself, the delivery of it and my perception of its usefulness.

Like, do I not trust someone just because they haven’t got time to update their Website regularly?  Or, if some ‘guru’ or other is highly active online and seems to have a lot of followers, sponsors and links all over the place, does that make what they have to say any more credible?  Does my style-over-substance sensibility dismiss an expert’s proposition out-of-hand because his/her site looks like crap?  Do I not even bother to read it, because it has no fancy graphics, bullet points and roll-over effects?

I need to keep a few extra wits about me, now that new media carries the message.  The simple task of discerning anything of value in amongst the sheer volume of information is a daunting one.  Judgment criteria go way beyond the content:

How did I find it in the first place?  A lot of sites get traffic thanks to nothing more than their search engine friendliness.  Google, Bing and Co. are working ever harder to bring you quality results, but they are a long way off passing too many value judgments and opinions on the links they deliver.

Is the self-appointed ‘opinion leader’ a sycophant who is just very good at recruiting followers through powers of persuasion, rather than the substance of their message?  It’s amazing what a blogger can cook up with a teaspoon of fawning and a few cups of self-aggrandisement.

Are they literate?  Even in today’s wrld of txting & ROFLMAOing, I maintain that someone with a reasonable command of the Queen’s English probably has most of their other faculties intact as well.

Is the thinking part of a groundswell?  Ideas whose times have come tend to pop up independently in multiple locations.  The best way forward is most likely going to be through ideas that many people are now beginning to expound, rather than one nutter banging on with his/her manifesto.  Does anyone agree with me here?  Oh the irony!  This is your NETT nutter, signing off for another month...

By Stefan Sojka

In business, one of the most important places on the Internet is your own Website.  So why do so many business Websites seem so unplanned, unprofessional and unfinished?  Do they really not care, or is something else going on?

I see two main factors conspiring against small business when it comes to Websites.  The first is the potential infinite scope and complexity of a Website – this tends to immobilise most people as they don’t know where to start.  The second is the false sense of simplicity that the hugely successful Websites lull us all into, giving the impression that they practically built themselves.

As users, we make ‘one-click’ book purchases, transfer money from country to country, bid furiously in auctions and buy plane tickets in the exact same window where we read the ‘about us’ page of our local pest controller.  From where we sit, it’s all the same – easy, fast and cheap.  We forget that the Auction site spends about $800 million a year on programmers.  Perhaps it is understandable that I got a phone call from a guy recently who wanted me to help him build ‘another eBay’ with a $5K budget!  As far as he knew, eBay was just a page on a screen with a few buttons on it.

If you want both a good laugh and the reassurance that you are not alone in your own incomprehension of what makes everything tick online, try http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com – real-world examples of just how out of touch some of us are.

There is hope.  With a little research and perhaps a bit of professional advice, you will learn to spot the difference between a $5K site and a multi-billion dollar global enterprise.  You might realise exactly where you fit in:  Somewhere in between.  Simple, affordable Websites can do amazing things, but they can only do what they are paid to do.  You are the one paying, so you need to know what you are paying for.  So start planning.

Before you approach Web designers for quotes for an unspecified length of string, work out what you want the site to do – write the draft content, collect the images, determine what features would be perfect for your business, decide how you want people to communicate with you, get some legal advice, business advice & technical advice.  Draw some rough wire-frames & collect a long list of links to competitor sites, sites you like and sites you hate.  Look around and see what other people are doing.  Ask yourself why particular sites seem to work so well – they probably planned it that way.

Your Website, if done properly, will be the cornerstone of your business.  It performs marketing, communication, branding, positioning, PR, showcase, statistics collection, customer database, Search Engine Optimisation, reputation and good will.  It is one of your most valuable assets, performing all these services for you even while you sleep.  So invest in it, starting with your own time.  Plan, plan, plan!

Try http://www.e-businessguide.gov.au as a starting point, then get out some paper and start scribbling.

By Stefan Sojka

As my life becomes increasingly interwoven in a tangled web of networks, gaining a perspective of how I fit in has become my life’s mission.

Network science is very new.  Sure networks have been around forever, but no one really stopped to think about just how complicated and powerful network behaviour is, until the mid 90s when the Internet kind of shoved it in our faces.  Albert-László Barabási’s book ‘Linked – How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life’ is an easily digestible summary of the Princeton Press scientific publication he co-wrote, “The Structure and Dynamics of Networks”.

The mathematics is staggering, describing how the simplest of connections and interactions can evolve structures and behaviours as phenomenal as our very own selves.  Individuals within a network need only perform the simplest of tasks to make this happen.  This is how civilizations, viral outbreaks and multinational corporations come to be.  Networks cause FaceBook, Beached Az, spam, Google, blogging and crowd-sourcing.

The more I think about it, the more embedded I seem to be.  So, it’s time to use these networks to my advantage.  The best thing I can do inside a network is to be active.  The simple tasks of emailing, clicking, posting, rating, linking and uploading are my means to participate.  My networks co-exist on- and off-line.  So here’s how it works and can work for you, if:

I join my local Rotary Club, a member invites me to join my local Chamber of Commerce, the local council holds a “Home-based Business Week” workshop and emails the Chamber asking if anyone would like to present.  I put my hand up.  At the talk, someone from NSW DSRD (Now Industry & Investment NSW) is there and invites me to speak at another event.  Someone at that event from the Department of Innovation invites me to a Hong Kong Trade and Development Council event in Sydney.  HKTDC asks if I would like to attend a trade show in Hong Kong, sponsored by AusTrade.  Much net­working ensued there.

Two months later.  I get a call from the Sydney Morning Herald asking me about my experience.  I get a decent sized article in the SMH business section.  Someone from Crikey.com.au calls me to ask how I do my PR and how I managed to get publicity in the SMH.  I tell them “it just happened because I work my network”.  They are intrigued and are interviewing me for an article about PR.  I will post that interview on my Website, along with all the other news stories about this chain of events.  I start popping up in Google for all kinds of searches because of all these activities.

I am now writing about all of this in this column, which I landed as a result of meeting the editor on a chat channel in 1995.  This column will become another news story on my Website.  Someone will read it and contact me about something.

And on it goes.  Such is the science, and behaviour of networks and what happens when I work them.

Perpetual promotion.  Try it for yourself.

By Stefan Sojka

Online advertising is booming.  The more people click, the more hungry business becomes for the eyeballs (and wallets) of the clickees.  This is the fattest cash cow on the planet.

I love Wikipedia – not only does it give me great info to fuel my column with excellent pages like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising, but it is non-profit and has no advertising on it.  Unfortunately, commercial reality dictates that Wikipedia will remain an extremely rare species.  Our future is destined to be paved with clicks of gold.

Google is by far the biggest player, with about 70% of the total on-line ad market – which works out to be about 400 gazillion dollars, enough to etch their logo on the sun, send a team of programmers to Andromeda to explore new markets and save the Google Earth on google.org.  They are the biggest for good reason – their system is very good.  It gives advertisers more control than anybody else, more reach into huge search and content markets and an ever-improving delivery of relevant ads to Web users as they refine their system.  Google’s search behaviour statistics get cumulatively refined at a rate of a few billion facts a day.

Web users want to find stuff and businesses want to be found.  It’s the perfect scenario… in theory.  The truth is that there is still a long way to go before clicks and sales are perfectly in sync.  Anyone who has used advertising programs knows that only a small proportion of the original search traffic converts into sales – and when you are bidding for every click, that can get a little scary at times.

So here is a brief glossary of on-line advertising terms to help you maintain your sense of humour while things evolve:

Auto-Bidding – Letting two computers – yours and your competitor’s – play poker with your credit cards.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – How many people accidentally clicked on your advert.

Bounce Rate – How many people realised it was an accident and hit their back-button… AFTER you paid for their click.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – How desperate you and your competitors are for business.  (I once saw a CPC for search term “mortgage” at $180 – for ONE CLICK!)

Return on Investment (ROI) – Putting your credit card statement and cheque account statement side by side and seeing which is bigger.

Page Rank (PR) – Discovering how insignificant you are compared to Apple, YouTube and get.adobe.com/reader

The reality is that on-line advertising can work spectacularly well.  Inefficient as it might be at times, it is far more targeted than mass media.  It is getting ever more sophisticated, especially when you consider sites like FaceBook.  They know everything about you and can serve you an advert for “getting ripped in 4 weeks without exercise” the moment you update your status to “man, that all-you-can-eat buffet was awesome!”
Maybe it will all get too hard for small business, who simply can’t afford the rising click costs or the time to devote to learning the schemes and systems required to capitalise effectively on all this paid traffic.  Perhaps it’s time to get back to our marketing roots – old school.  A giant inflatable gorilla, a sandwich board and bullhorn!

By Stefan Sojka

Lately I have become fascinated with three things:

1. The recent discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting stars in our galaxy ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet )

2. Advances in understanding of life on the microscopic scale.  Watch this ( multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_innerlife.html ) and prepare to freak out when you realise this is going on inside you in 100 trillion different locations

3. Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project – an attempt to build a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain                        ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS3wMC2BpxU )

I guess I am quite fortunate to be a member of the only species on earth capable of even beginning to comprehend the nature of the universe and to wonder about my place in it.

Here we sit, on the wafer thin surface of a tiny planet, after 4 billion years of evolution, where cellular life forms have tried and tried again to self-organise into the best co-operative self-perpetuating civilizations they can – without a brain between them.  Now our planet owns trillions of brains, including 6 billion big enough to organise the civilization we live in today.  Great apes, aping the same net­working capacity on a global scale that our cells have been using microscopically for eons.

Yet sometimes we seem so dumb.  We struggle in relationships, battle with each other and worry ourselves sick.  When are we going to ‘get it’?

If you ask me, it is when we finally surrender to the process.  Life got us to where we are, so it’s time we started living.  Whatever I am doing, wherever I find myself within society’s matrix, I really have no other choice but to try to be the best ‘me’ I can be.

As I take stock of the year that was and get set for the next orbit around the sun, it’s time for this revolution’s resolutions.  I am going to honour and obey my cellular civilization and I am going to maximise my contribution to human civilization.  In other words, I am going to be healthy and do good work.

And if you aren’t going to do the same, then get out of the way.  I am going to start choosing my clients, rather than letting them choose me.  If they aren’t operating at least on the same level as I do, ethically, I’m not going to let them drag me down.  I’m pursuing perpetual promotion.  Onwards and upwards.  Evolution and creation.  I’m stepping up and stepping out.  I’m not going to let evolution’s efforts to get me here be in vain and I sure don’t want to find out that there are civilizations living on those exoplanets more advanced than ours.  Aren’t we supposed to be a competitive race?

We’d better start working as a team.  In 2010, let’s all lift our game, raise our standards and spend each day on our human scale, using our microscopic inheritance to fulfill our cosmic calling.

In a galaxy, 4 billion light years from here, beings just like us might be observing an exoplanet we call ‘Earth’ preparing to come alive.  Closer to home, inside my own head, I can imagine this scenario …and feel pretty glad to be here.

By Stefan Sojka

As much as we can’t imagine life without computers now, for the entire history of humankind, up until the computer, one could hardly imagine life with one.  Everyone just got on with it.  Sydney Harbour Bridge was constructed with pencils and paper, slide rules and the occasional abacus.  The entire workforce was managed with ledgers, index cards and rubber stamps.  Workers were paid by cash and perhaps some of the bigger transactions were done with hand-written promissory notes.  Though typewriters and telephones were in use, most communication was surely face-to-face, or scrawled with fountain pens.

What’s my point?  That somehow everything still worked.  Huge projects, like hydro-electric schemes, subway systems and even the Opera House, with all its curvy complexity, were completed well before anyone “needed” a computer to get anything done.  Systems and networks existed, such as information and project management.  Most importantly; humans interacted with other humans, agreed, shook hands, signed contracts and made it happen.

We are being mesmerised into thinking that somehow it is only since the birth of ‘Web 2.0’ that we have had the ability to socially network.  We forget that before FaceBook, we had a little black book.  While computers and the Internet have certainly facilitated and amplified net­working to unfathomable scales, most real business is done in person.  Politicians might all use Blackberries and iPhones, but they haven’t moth-balled the two houses of parliament just yet.  Most offices still have board rooms.  Trade shows and Expos seem to be experiencing a boom right now.  Computers do make them far more efficient to organise, while at the same time, people are realising how awesome they are at generating new business and engaging with our peers.

Off-line net­working is one of my most valuable assets as a business.  Sure, I want to tip all my contacts into my email list, and refer people to my Website at any available opportunity, but I would be missing out on a huge opportunity if I didn’t work my real-world life as much as possible.

I joined my local Chamber of Commerce and my local Rotary Club.  I attend many business events, Expos, functions and launches.  Recently I joined a chapter of BNI, a hugely successful global network of business owners existing for the sole purpose of promoting word-of-mouth marketing.  Even though my business is very much focused on the Internet, I still like to meet my clients in person and work predominantly with in-house staff.  I am a people person.  Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to engage face-to-face – at least until virtual reality evolves sufficiently into fooling my senses that I am in the same room as you – and that is still quite a long way off.

If I can work the world just like our forefathers did, then enhance all those engagements with Web technology, like collaboration tools, Web-based communication and marketing, I’ll be unstoppable.