What’s a business lead? We’re a bit confused by the term as well, but according to Square, Brougher will oversee Square’s “growth operations including revenue products, international expansion, customer support, and partnerships.” That’s a big plate.

Brougher was most recently Google’s VP of SMB Global Sales and Operations, where she managed the team in charge of acquiring, growing, and retaining small business advertisers. That experience should serve Brougher well as Square, since a good chunk of its mobile payments revenues comes from 3 million small business owners.

As for international expansion, Brougher has a lot of ground to cover. Outside of the U.S., Square so far has only launched in Canada.

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The recent poll of 500 U.S. small business owners uncovered that large percentages of these entrepreneurs are relying on remote work to balance their need to get away with keeping their companies running smoothly. On average the respondents plan to work remotely 18 days over the summer. Fifteen percent plan to work remotely 36 days or more, while nearly half of owners plan to work remotely for at least two weeks. One in four stated their companies rely on telecommuting.

“The results demonstrate the extent to which telephone and video conferencing have become ingrained in the work habits of small business owners,” said Glenn Bray, senior director, cloud collaboration applications technology group, Cisco. “It’s clear small business owners need to stay connected to the office, even during the summer vacation season.”

What’s also clear is that small business owners, freed from the bureaucratic hassles of larger organizations, find plenty of benefit in remote working and manage to make leading at a distance work for their teams. All of which suggests that the what’s holding back remote work at big firms is more a matter of culture and inertia than logistics.

Do you agree?

Image courtesy of Flickr user uros velickovokic. 

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Duda is bringing hundreds of thousands of small-and medium-sized businesses to the mobile Web, giving food trucks and haute cuisine joints, attorneys and dentists, their first taste of the mobile Internet and a means for their customers to find them on their phones.

We last reported on Duda when Google tapped the Silicon Valley/Israeli startup to power its Go Mo program, which will optimize any Website for mobile and host it for a year at no charge. But the company has also licensed its service to AT&T, HP, Yahoo and Webs.com, leading to enormous growth in its business. Last August it was hosting less 100,000 sites. Now it’s up 1.65  million, CMO Dennis Mink said.

A good portion of those sites are in the personal rather than the small business category. Duda will allow any user to throw a free but ad-supported mobile-optimized version of their Website online, so anyone wanting to optimize their 100 greatest Baywatch moments tribute page or Twilight fan fiction portal can easily do so. Duda’s primary customers, though, are the ones that either pay $9 a month — or come through Go Mo — to access its premium features.

It beats advertising on public benches

Including pizzerias, restaurants are Duda’s biggest customers, accounting for 28 percent of its premium sites. Duda recently began direct integration with Open Table, allowing the more sophisticated set to place reservations directly from the mobile browser – rather than just order up delivery with click-to-call.

Food trucks, which already depend heavily on social media to bring in customers, have also begun to use the service, Mink said. For instance, Brooklyn’s Mexicue uses a Duda mobile site to broadcast its trucks’ current location, to point people to its Twitter and Facebook accounts and to detail its current menu.

Professional services makes up the next biggest category, encompassing locksmiths, plumbers and a whole lot of lawyers, Mink said. Health and Wellness businesses account for 10 percent of its sites. About half of those are beauty salons and spas, but a good portion of the remaining chunk are doctors and dentists.

“For service professionals, they want phone calls,” Mink said. “If you’re a lawyer or a dentist, that’s how you build your livelihood.”

Another major category is travel and tourism, which is dominated by small, privately owned hotels and B&Bs, Mink said. The logic here is that when people are on the road they often don’t have an easy way to access a computer. Having a mobile site is therefore key to landing last-minute business.

What Duda can’t do (but is working on)

Duda’s site builder does have some limitations. It’s not building new and distinct mobile pages for its customers. Rather it automatically plugs content from their full Websites into template pages optimized for the mobile browser. The approach may not be as slick as a custom-designed mobile Website, but it has its advantages, Mink said. It’s cheap, and you can get a mobile Web presence up within minutes. It’s also easier to manage, since any update you make to the full site is automatically reflected in the mobile version.

That said, more sophisticated features don’t carry over to the microbrowser. For the hotel and B&B sites, for instance, it’s a simple button push to call the front desk, but if you try to access their online booking features, you’re taken to a full PC browser page, which is difficult to use on a small screen. Duda also can’t carry over in-site e-commerce features, which explains the dearth of e-retail businesses among its customers.

But Mink said Duda is solving many of those problems through partnerships. Its integration with Open Table allows restaurants to book digital reservations. And it just reached an agreement with eBay to mobilize its ProStores customers retail sites, though it charges more for the feature (a $99 one-time setup fee and a $20 monthly subscription).

Duda has raised $8.4 million since its founding in 2009. Its latest Series B round brought in $6 million and was led by Pitango, Israel’s largest venture capital firm. While the company was founded in Tel Aviv, it is now based in Mountain View, Calif.

Food truck image courtesy of Flickr user edibleNY; Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Lasse Kristensen

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Source: Intermedia. Click the image for more.

Intermedia handles around 350,000 premium hosted Microsoft Exchange servers, making it the largest such email provider operating worldwide. It surveys the device makeup of its customers’ ActiveSync-capable smartphones and tablets (basically any device that isn’t a BlackBerry) in the process of running said servers, gathering the data in cloud mobility reports.

This time around, for the period between the end of May and August, iPad activation rose a considerable 102 percent compared to the period immediately preceding it, making it the number two most-activated device (including smartphones) that Intermedia supports. The breakdown of total activations for the period saw the iPhone at number one with 51 percent overall, followed by the iPad with 21 percent. Rounding out the top five were Motorola devices with 9 percent, HTC handsets with 8 percent, and finally LG, Nokia, Palm and Samsung devices with a combined total of less than 4 percent.

Apple’s success with SMB customers can likely be accounted for somewhat by the greater willingness of smaller enterprise customers to embrace “bring your own device” models of IT hardware support, but it’s a trend that seems to apply equally among enterprises of all sizes.

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In the version of Screen Sharing that currently ships with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (1.1.1), users can log in to a remote system, but will only see the screen that’s currently active on the target computer. Mouse or keyboard is shared between the remote computer, and the computer using Screen Sharing to remotely access it, so if a user was actively interacting with each, only one could effectively use the target computer at one time. In Lion, however, a local user can go about their business uninterrupted, while a remote users enjoys their own separate graphical session.

Screen Sharing also gets some additional tools borrowed from Apple Remote Desktop (ARD), which is the professional remote management and distribution client Apple sells, aimed mostly at business and enterprise users. Screen Sharing lifts an Observe mode (viewing, but no control), a Control mode, and a Screen Capture tool from ARD.

Screen Sharing’s new multiple user login support and ARD features should make it a fairly capable tool for managing small, Mac-based offices, or for managing a home network of Macs. It will, for instance, be possible to remote into another computer using an admin account and change software installations or perform remote upgrades while the local user works away uninterrupted. Apple seems keen on breaking down the barrier between consumer and professional software (Lion Server will be integrated free in the regular shipping version of Mac OS X Lion, for example); this Screen Sharing redesign is another step in that direction, and one which small businesses will relish.

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Before you can begin any kind of marketing or promotion, it’s important to have a firm grasp of the purpose, mission, and values you want for your business, but for the sake of this post, we’ll assume you’ve gotten that far. You know your unique selling proposition, your target market, and what your business represents. Now you just need to find a way to create a more focused and consistent plan for increasing awareness and, ultimately, finding more customers and clients.

Finding Your Marketing Strategy and Tactics

One of the hardest things about marketing is selecting the overall strategy and individual tactics for promotion. There are hundreds of ideas; narrowing them down can be a challenge, especially if you’re new to marketing.

One of the best ways to get your initial direction for marketing online is by looking to other successful companies or entrepreneurs and learning from their experience. For example, if you want to build a blog, find a few bloggers that you admire and follow, and then dig back to the very beginning of their blogging days. This will take a bit of time, since most successful blogs take a while to establish. If they’ve published two or more posts per week, it might take a while to get back to their very first post, but keep digging!

Once you reach the beginning, get ready to take notes. You’re going to begin going through all their posts looking for clues as to what has made them such a success, and here are a few things to look for as you go.

• How often do they publish to their blog? Weekly? Twice-weekly? Several times daily?
• Are their posts long or short?
• At what point did they starting getting consistent comments, and when did their comments start to steadily increase? Was there something that they changed or were doing during those times (and the months before) to generate those comments?
• How is their site laid out, and do you notice anything about their site that might be particularly helpful for capturing visitor attention and converting them to subscribers or customers?
• How has their writing evolved over time?
• What kinds of posts do they regularly publish? Interviews? Advice? How-to articles?
• Many bloggers tend to create “How I Created a Successful Blog” posts, once they reach a certain level of success. Keep an eye out, and if you find this sort of post, pay close attention to the blogger’s advice, and then think of ways you might be able to apply that advice to your own marketing efforts.

Be aware that there is no single answer to some of the questions listed above. If you can find a successful blogger who advocates short daily posts, I guarantee that you can find another who prefers long articles posted weekly. The key is to find an approach that you think will work best for your situation, personality and style.

Also, a note of caution, you’re not looking to copy any other blogger (in fact, that would be a good way to fail). You want to be original and unique with your business, so the point of this exercise is not to copy anyone else, but rather to emulate the marketing strategies that they’ve used to build their blogs. Think of these bloggers as mentors and role models, not people to clone.

Brainstorming Your Options

As mentioned, the options for marketing and promoting a business are virtually endless, but here are a few that I like best:

• Blogging, guest blogging and article marketing
• Podcasting and video casting
• Interviews and appearances for relevant websites and media opportunities
• Online networking

Once you have some ideas for potential marketing tactics, you’re ready to begin weeding through them to find those that you think are most likely to work for you. In next week’s post, we’ll discuss tools to help you with tracking and organizing your options and then begin prioritizing them into a plan of attack.

What tactics do you use to market your business now, and what ideas are you thinking of adding to the mix soon?

Photo by Flickr user dps, licensed under CC 2.0

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This got me thinking about how much my beliefs about business have changed in the ten years since I started my own company. I used to agree with the common recommendation that lines should be clearly drawn between one’s business and personal space. The advice was that you shouldn’t work from your kitchen table, and that you should have a separate space for your business.

From a balance perspective, it seemed only natural to compartmentalize, and to have clearly-defined boundaries between work and home. After all, wasn’t that how it worked with “regular jobs”? So when I created a business, I attempted to maintain clear boundaries between it and my home life.

But I began to see that my life as an entrepreneur was very different from those with “regular jobs.” For me, it was a struggle to determine where my work life stopped and my home life began. I thought that something was wrong with me for a while, but then I realized that I actually liked the blurred lines. I liked ‘living’ as much within my business as outside. Since that was true, why was it so necessary to separate the different parts of my life?

I’ve come to accept that I like having a “kitchen table business.” Like Chris Brogan, I have way more time with family and friends now than I ever did before starting a business. I have flexibility to work when I’m able: around sickness, around unpredictable bouts of insomnia, and around the even more unpredictable ebbs and flows of life. So while I used to believe that having a “kitchen table business” would set me up to become a workaholic, I now see it as a way to live my life exactly as I want.

Does my business have boundaries? Yes, but they’re more like gray areas. I’m a web worker, but I also have Internet-free days. There are days when I work eighteen hours, and other days when I work three. Sometimes I work in my pajamas from the sofa, but I can crave the structure of my office. In the end, it all evens out, and for the most part, I feel I’m able to maintain a semblance of balance.

How do you balance your life and business? Do you set clearly defined boundaries, or are you able to work successfully at the kitchen table?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Muffet

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I think about this all the time as it relates to my business. Generally, we come up with plans, ways we’re going to market our businesses, manage them, and keep things growing and moving along smoothly, but what are we missing? Are there blind spots we don’t yet know exist that could potentially be fatal to the success of our companies?

Blind Spot #1: Giving Up Too Soon (or Not Planning to Weather the First Years)

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen small business owners make is simply giving up too soon. We all want to chase after shiny new distractions as they show up, but many times, we already have everything we need to succeed, if we would only stay the course and allow enough time for our business ideas to take hold.

It’s so important to plan for the hard times of that first year or so in business, when there’s very little money coming in. Plan to cut corners as much as possible, both with your personal and business expenses, so that you can afford to stick with it until you start generating revenue.

Many times, it’s easy to look back on past ideas and failures and think, “If I had only stuck with that, I think it could have worked.” You have to be willing and able to hang in there for the long haul, and so often, it’s just too hard for business owners to weather that first year or so.

Blind Spot #2: Not Consistently and Actively Promoting the Business

A close runner-up in fatal blind spots is not actively and consistently promoting the business. So many times, business owners get caught up in planning and tinkering the minor things within the business that they neglect actually going out and finding new customers or clients on a regular basis.

I was fortunate to have gotten my start in real estate, where you have to work under the guidance of a broker for several years before being able to go out on your own, and in the real estate industry, one of the first things you’re taught is how important lead generation is to your success. I can remember my broker telling us that the most successful and experienced agents in the firm still did lead generation a couple of hours a day. Of course, I had no idea what lead generation was at the time, but at least the importance of it stuck with me all these years.

Part of the problem for most business owners is not knowing what to do when it comes to promoting their businesses. There are so many different tactics for marketing and promotion that it can quickly become confusing and overwhelming.  It would be far more helpful for new business owners to hear that they should simply pick two or three tactics for promoting their businesses, plan to stick with them for six to twelve months, and to be very aggressive with them for at least two hours each and every day.

Blind Spot #3: Thinking You Can Do Everything Yourself

A third blind spot most business owners have is thinking they can do everything themselves (or thinking that they have to do everything themselves). Lack of money, time and even experience can make a business owner think he or she is not in the position to hire help, and the process of finding and building a support team can seem like a full time job on its own.

The good news is that it’s possible to inch your way into delegation by finding ways to outsource one piece of your work at a time, and if you don’t think you can afford a paid assistant at the beginning, start with a few interns. That way, you can slowly test the waters with a support staff, while also seeing if the interns you hire would make good permanent additions to your team.

For most of us, the thought of starting a new business is as exciting as first learning to drive: we just want to be given the keys, jump in the car, and go! Certainly, there’s room for the thrill of being in control and finally going where we want to go, but if we want to avoid as many fender benders as possible, it helps to know to look out for blind spots.

What blind spots do you think most small business owners have in the beginning?

Photo by Flickr user PhotoDu.de, licensed under CC 2.0

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The trouble with evaluating small business collaboration is that SMBs differ in their needs. The variation between small businesses and their needs are far more dramatic that those of large companies. Most big corporations are going to have similar needs: they’ll need to be able to handle a range of standard tasks, like human resources. But a small business could be an individual freelancer working out of his house, or a business with 50 employees. This variation means that choosing the right SMB collaboration tools is not straightforward.

The Tools to Consider

There seems to be an impression that the bigger and better-known tools (such as those from Google or Salesforce) should be the first a small business considers when looking for collaboration software. But when a business has specific needs, that’s not the right approach to take. Consider just about any financial professional: no matter how many people they have on the team, they will have reporting requirements that mean that applications with reporting tools built-in should be a better fit than something like Google Apps, which was built for broader business needs.

There is no set list of applications that a smaller business should consider. Rather, the first step should be to take a look at all of the features the business needs and then searching from there.

Looking for Support

One valuable consideration that the SMB Group’s report brings up is the question of service and support. For smaller organizations, the question of support is crucial: there simply may not be enough room in the budget to support any full-time IT staff, making it absolutely necessary to choose applications that include some level of support as a matter of course. Even for a business that works in technology, the time and effort spent supporting certain applications could make them prohibitively expensive to use. Choosing one, instead, that comes with support services — even if the company has to pay a higher price up-front — can be very worthwhile.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Michael Lokner

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It is certainly possible to use this sort of system — one of those informal discussions I had was with a website designer who manages about 30 contractors with a few shared Google spreadsheets. But it is a lot harder. You can’t share Post-It notes with someone who doesn’t come into the office on a regular basis and such systems can mean that a business can’t easily expand to work with contractors and employees who work remotely. That means that the boss is tied to that same physical location. These systems can require more time to maintain (when time is money) and can be lost in a matter of seconds.

Organic Growth and Project Management

There’s a very simple reason that a smaller business winds up with a less formal approach to project management. More often than not, a system grows organically: the boss needs to notify an employee of a change to a project and that pad of sticky notes is convenient. Pretty soon, it’s standard practice to write a note, stick it to someone’s monitor and consider the matter done. In much the same way, a set of spreadsheets can evolve and grow, adding on extra pages to handle new facets of projects. After even a few weeks of this sort of organic growth, it seems impossible to get away from these spreadsheets. Not only is this the way you’ve always done things, but it’s also a system that you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into setting up. Making a change not only will take time, training and money, but you’re throwing away the effort that’s gone into maintaining those spreadsheets.

Bringing Small Business Project Management Online

On the surface, it seems like the best method is to compromise — stick with the existing situation, but maybe share some of those documents through a tool like Google Docs. But for small business owners, finding robust project management tools (especially web-based applications) can scratch itches you didn’t even know you had. Simply by being more organized, you can expect to be more efficient and save your employees’ time — but it goes beyond making it easy for your staff to know what to work on next. Someone has to check over your system regularly, to both make sure that everyone’s doing their job and to make sure nothing’s slipped through the cracks. The more you can automate that progress, the more time and money you can save — and you can be sure that you’re not disappointing a client because your spreadsheet didn’t remind you of a due date.

What project management tools do you use?

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