There are many great resources out there on all manner of topics. If you are at this site then there’s a good chance that entrepreneurship catches your fancy, on which there’s no shortage of good knowledge coming from web sites, magazines, books, associations, interviews, and so much more. Most of the time it’s information overload that we are dealing with, not information scarcity. It all sounds good, but with so much out there how do you put it to use?

For starters you need to accept that you can’t use it all. I have read a tremendous amount of information on many key aspects of business, yet at best I have mild expertise in a couple tiny niches. The collective mind of the human race has developed a vast set of data that cannot be taken in by a single person. Perhaps if you had a wise man (or woman) studying for an entire life, but who wants to learn all this stuff and not apply it?

I’m reminded twice of friends who kept making the same mistake in learning how to write computer programs. These are very different individuals who have never met each other. Each would come to me asking for advice on a particular programming language topic or algorithm. I’d help them out and sooner or later they would know that one technique. Yet to date neither has written any software program of significant length, convinced that they need to start by picking up large books on software design and studying for years. They are on their way to becoming keepers of very specific and sometimes obscure bits of computer science knowledge, but they haven’t progressed very far on becoming programmers.

Unless becoming a knowledge keeper is your desire, accept that most of that collective knowledge will never be yours and be grateful for what you are able to learn and apply! In the above case my friends would have actually learned far more by reading a little bit then diving right into writing a software program. Sure the first few programs would be quite terrible, but they’d actually learn far more through that personal experience than by trying absorb the knowledge from a book. At that point they would be ready to once again learn something from the experts and then give it a go again.

OK so it’s impossible to learn it all, but how does one go about learning more? How do you most effectively retain the great advice that you are picking up every single day such that it brings benefits into your life? In the framework of not retaining everything, we are more interested in being able to find the information when we do need it rather than having it for havings sake.

I don’t believe in attempting to create a miniature library, mostly because I’ve tried and it’s failed each time. Thanks to the internet, static information becomes outdated too quickly. Furthermore the internet already provides an amazing index of not just web sites but traditional materials, along with easy ways of obtaining the resources when you need them. Why try to rebuild something that is already there? It may be that the great piece of information you came across doesn’t need to be stored by you at all. Is it really something so special that you won’t come across it again when and if you are specifically looking for that information? Trying to hold onto too much knowledge is a flaw in itself.

If the advice, tip, or procedure is relevant and worth keeping then it needs to be stored or acted on. Again with the internet being the vast and constantly updated library that it is, I don’t believe in trying to unnecessarily store static copies of items. In many cases it makes sense to just store the location of the resource. If you are worried about the original material disappearing then having a copy of your own may make sense. You may wish to print it to PDF instead of paper, since filing cabinet space is many magnitudes more limited and expensive than your hard drive.

When storing information to revisit you need a sensible way of organizing it. Right now I’m experimenting with mind mapping, which naturally creates a nice topic drill-down structure. The mind map structure is naturally an index, with every node either containing or pointing to the right resource. My first layer of topics is very broad: “Business”, “Productivity”, “Programming”, “Technology”, “Cooking”. Below that I get more specific, for example “Business” has “Entrepreneurship”, “Marketing”, and so on. Delving into Marketing yields “Traditional”, “Internet” and “Software”. I’m only storing topics that I really care about. Every single piece of information that makes it in there must be something that I intend to revisit, such as a book I’d like to read in the future, an amazing database reference, or a recipe that I really liked. I will not actively seek out things to put in my mind map for the sake of having more information at my finger tips. That’s Google’s job.

What about acting on all this knowledge? If it’s something specific that can be acted on right away then it’s really easy. For example if you need to build a bird house and come across a bird house building article then it’s pretty obvious what happens next. What about less simple advice? Things that take a while to implement? What about those simple points that a business article or book makes, which in a single sentence hide the vast complexity of what they actually require you do? Here it’s a matter of making the leap from reading over the advice to consciously deciding to allocate the mental and physical resources to implementing it. After that … do it! Self help books often fail to give results because people get caught up in the idea that by simply reading the advice their problems will magically get fixed. The book sells the reader on the idea of minimal effort and in turn the reader expects to apply absolutely minimal effort to solving complex and difficult problems. Don’t skip over the little points of action that are sometimes hidden away. You need to act on what you read for there to be benefit.

Don’t forget your subconscious self in all of this! I find that what I consciously remember pales in comparison to the information I have stored-up which my brain somehow manages to pull out only when I come across a situation where I need it. I don’t always read books trying to consciously squeeze out specific information. I enjoy them, and the tidbits of knowledge I glean without ever putting pen to paper. I am confident that my brain has retained some important knowledge, and when I am going to take on a project that actively involves the information in the book then I can revisit it.

Running a business is a crazy experience at best, with a billion things happening at any moment. Despite great time management techniques, impeccable organization, and 12 hours of dedication a day, stuff that should be done tends to slip by when its not urgent. Some things you never do get around to and they become hidden friction slowing your business success down.

Perhaps your website still talks about a business location or product that no longer exists or the design needs a facelift? Maybe your bookkeeping need to be updated, preventing you from seeing the sales information you need? What ever happened to that fantastic sales letter you were going to write? Why haven’t you signed-up for that training course that will allow you to offer a new service? When’s the last time you have tested new marketing copy? Have you backed up your data lately?

Devote some time this week to air out the closet and take a very close look at all aspects of your business. Catch those missing items that could be turning customers off, undermining your sales, or waiting to cause a disaster. Something as simple as an outdated copyright date on your website can needlessly hurt your professional image (I’ve been bugged many times about forgetting to update this). Make a nice list of everything that needs to be done and then incorporate the tasks into your action items for the next week or two.

This is a project that I’m participating in this week too. Here are just some of the items that I’ve caught:

• Update About and Contact pages on this blog.
• Transfer all domains to my main registrar account.
• Enter last two months of PayPal transactions into accounting software.
• Check all websites for outdated information.
• Try several optimization ideas.

What weights will you be taking off your business this week?

This article is part of the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. All week you will find articles that demystify what’s involved and what the secrets are to success.

Having clients is a great thing, but you must be able to provide support for your product or service to keep them happy. Rather than seeing this as a burden and extra expense, you should look at this as an opportunity to best the large corporations who still haven’t figured out that outsourcing to giant offshore call centres with long hold times is not the way to help a customer. I’m going to share some strategies on how to pull this off without setting unrealistic expectations or going crazy in the process.

This article assumes that you are a fairly typical small online business owner with minimal or no staff. In short you are the one providing the majority of support in between the million other business related tasks you have and possibly part or fulltime work elsewhere. If you are large enough to have a dedicated support person then my only plea is that you train them in your product and provide enough authority to actually fix something.

Establishing How Support is Provided

I favour using e-mail whenever possible for support communications and I encourage it highly on my sites. E-mail provides tremendous advantages since it can be answered in many more situations than a phone (think meeting, lecture, bus, noisy mall) and doesn’t require you to stop in your tracks to pick it up immediately. The net result is that if you are properly organized and have an internet-enabled PDA, it’s actually easier to respond quickly to support inquiries. E-mail also removes issues with poor connections (quite frequent with the advancement of cell phones), difficult to understand accents, and gives you time to think about the problem before responding.

I wouldn’t recommend removing the phone number entirely as having it listed has a positive effect on customer confidence and sometimes it’s reasonable for someone to wish to call you. I like to include it on the bottom of the support form, and make note that regular inquiries will be handled faster through e-mail. Don’t have a support number that can’t be found - certain large companies do this and the customer response is overwhelmingly negative. I wonder why.

Leverage the Personal Touch

Dealing with a product or service issue can be extremely frustrating when a call centre is involved. Waiting on hold, being transfered to three different people, and having to constantly retell your story gives plenty of reason to avoid contacting support. As a small company you have a chance to change this by providing personalized support. Knowing who your customers are, how they use your product, and remembering what their past issues were makes it possible to respond effectively to support queries with minimal annoyance for the customer. As the owner you have the actual authority to solve a clients problem by providing creative solutions that would normally be disallowed by a strict support script.

One mistake that small online business owners make (I’ve made it too in the past) is robbing themselves of this personal touch by trying to sound like a big corporation. Yaro Starak writes about this problem in greater depth.

24/7 is for Convenience Stores

When I first found myself in a situation where I had to regularly answer support issues I was determined to provide the fastest response times I could. I would always answer e-mails as soon as I received them, often interrupting other work and throwing myself offtrack. I would even answer e-mails in the middle of the night if I happened to wake up. The support times were indeed great, but this strategy completely interrupted anything else I was working on and set unrealistic expectations in customers for future support queries. It also contributed to much unnecessary stress. I have since discovered that I can get the same level of customer satisfaction answering non-urgent requests once or twice a day, as people are very happy to receive the Personal Touch mentioned above.

Depending on your business you may need to work out a different support schedule. Whatever you setup be sure that you have plenty of time to devote to the rest of your business without being interrupted by support. In some cases you may need to be able to respond to urgent issues so be sure you have a way to identify these without being bogged down by non-urgent requests.

Staying Organized

There’s no right way to organize your support system, and how you do it depends on the request volume and level of communication required to solve an issue. You may find helpdesk software useful, but be wary of implementing systems that make it difficult to access support on the go, or which make submitting a support ticket harder. After trying a number of systems I finally put together a simple support contact form that e-mails the issue to a support e-mail address. This address then forwards the mail to me or someone else I have on support. Since it’s e-mail I can deal with support issues whenever I want from any internet-enabled device.

Do be sure that you have an easy way of referencing past issues that a customer has had. I can view past communications simply by sorting my mailbox using the From column, and I can make notes about a customer’s account through a customer manager application that I have developed. I am also sure to mark issues that aren’t resolved with a Follow-up flag (you can use the red flag in Outlook or the star in Gmail) so that a query not resolved immediately isn’t lost.

Minimizing the Need for Support

Support queries should be exceptional issues. If you are frequently being contacted about the same thing then it’s time to address the root cause of the problem by either automating the task being requested, providing the information requested in an easily accessible place like a FAQ, or improving your user interface. This will not only save you time, but also increase customer happiness. No one really wants to have to contact support over something they should be able to do or read about themselves.