Consultingcents's Blog

DocStoc, a document paradise

consultingcents — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:15:06 +0000

Today, we are introducing Docstoc, which is a site that publishes different types of documents ranging from legal, business, personal finance and education to many others. This site somewhat works like crowd sourcing for designs except that it deals primarily within the document space instead of designs and that this is free. DocStoc allows users to upload and download documents for free while offering some premium content for a low price.

Some useful tips in utilizing this site would be downloading free legal documents compared to going to the lawyer to draft up common documentations while modifying the conditions within the templates. On that note, we do advise getting advice from a professional lawyer if you needs are more specialized. Below are some documents that we found to be useful as an IT company:

Simple Web Design Contract: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2665843/Sample-Web-Design-Contract

Simple Partnership Agreement: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/413117/Partnership-Agreement

Extensive Web Design Contract: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/126671/Web-Development-Contract

The best part of utilizing DocStoc is probably picking some of the documents that highlight features that you like and combining them into a complete document. This in-turn gives you flexibility and also reduces your costs substantially.

Please feel free to leave a comment highlighting your experiences utilizing DocStoc.

Get FREE valuable and high quality business advice

consultingcents — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:02:51 +0000

Today, we are highlighting a site that we think is a hot spot for getting relatively reliable consultative advice on all your business needs. This site is called LinkedIn.

Unlike Yahoo Answers, where any individual can respond to your questions under anonymity and where their credentials are nowhere to be found, LinkedIn is able to show you who is actually answering your question and allows you to see their credentials since most of them are highly qualified professionals or business owners. Most LinkedIn members are more than happy to answer your pressing business questions and provide thought provoking questions in the respective LinkedIn groups. You could also utilize other pay per question services like Just Answers ,which start at about US$30 per question, though the incremental quality increase, according to me, is not economical. Below are some sample questions that we asked in LinkedIn for case study purposes:

Question 1: If I have a joomla hosting site and a psd file, do I just need to convert the psd file into a css or into a whole joomla skin in order to implement the design on the hosting site?

Best Answer Picked:

Properly, you must have the psd converted to html with css, not just css. A joomla skin is called a template and the html/css will be used to create a joomla template, which is then uploaded and selected as the default template.

The template will include module positions and then you have to figure out how to integrate the various components, modules and plug ins to make your site look and function correctly. This includes a good deal of css tweaking.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance. Most all of the sites we build are in joomla and I just launched two sites for clients today. www.asetpartners and www.hebraicstudies.com. Many more in our portfolio.

Brian

http://designbstudios.com

Question 2: What is the best way to market an IT related product to micro and small businesses?

Best Answer Picked:

Make a presentation to them on the sidelines of event involving SMEs, since these guys may not be able to spare time specially to attend to your presentation or demo. Make the product appear less complicated and more user friendly, minimum customisation and kind of off-the-shelves item. Remember most SMEs do not have dedicated IT team. Reassure them of the product support that you will provide. In your presentation, stress more on the money and the manpower they can save rather then complicated technical details of your product. Tell them what is in store for them in the product. Besides this, it would be great if you have other clients using your products, make out some convincing success stories and share it with them. All the best.

Kishore Sonecha

Vice President Systems & Remittances at State Bank of India

However, remember to bring it forward by helping other individuals out by answering their questions. Let us know what your thoughts are on this topic.

Business cards

consultingcents — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:35:58 +0000

For our business cards, we tried using Vista Print as it was roughly cheaper by about 20% compared to Staples. For a 500 card bundle, it cost us about CAD$67 dollars, which included shipping costs. We had used the “upload your own image” option and had images for the front and back end of the card. We waited eagerly to see what will be the final product from our purchase and it was not as great as what we expected (maybe we had too high of an expectation). Upon review, I saw that some cards had images that were not properly within the borders of the business card while some had certain portions cut off. All in all, roughly 10% of the total number of cards were “defective”. So in reality, we really saved 10%. We haven’t used a “premium” provider or a physical provider (a business card printing store) yet so we can’t really compare the quality in terms of the number of “defective” business cards.

We at Consulting Cents are dedicated to a numerical approach and thus would love to hear from you in terms of defective cards percentage in-terms of price and your provider.

Crowd Source your custom designing needs

consultingcents — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:17:24 +0000

Going forward, we believe the crowd sourcing methodology is the next wave for the custom design industry. Custom design can range from website design, illustrations or anything to do with creative works. However, there is one major shortcoming currently, which is time despite its advantages of:

(a) not having to provide detailed specifications (besides showcasing other similar examples of what the buyer wants)

(b) access to a global base of designers

(d) much lower costs

(e) not time consuming since you are outsourcing this out

(f) not getting stuck with a designer that eventually isn’t as good as what you think he or she is

Time is required to let the designers submit their designs and these design submissions require feedback in-order to really make full use of this methodology effectively. If you do not provide feedback, your submissions will be greatly lessen and you will probably see a deterioration of design submission because designers do not KNOW what you want since you are not directing them to the right direction.

Below are some of the results we got by using Design Bay for our business card design, which we are quite happy with. Costs? US$50.

Please let us know about your experience with it by leaving your comments below.

Maximize your Logo design dollars

consultingcents — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:54:02 +0000

When we were deciding on getting a company logo, we had the problem of identifying a reputable designer that would work within our budget and even when we did find a designer, with about CAD$300 we would probably get about three design submission at best and this quote would expand dramatically if you would like more submissions. This problem was solved when we went to LogoTournament and created a logo design contest for US$250. The result? 242 design submissions (this includes color variations of similar designs). The designers in LogoTournament were prompt with requests and designers with very high quality work. The best thing was the logo design process took out the greatest risk for buyers like us, which is ending up picking the wrong designer for the job and ending up with three very low quality logo designs. You can go to http://logotournament.com/contests/msr_consulting_cents to see how our contest went. This was the final logo that we picked.

Thus, if you require a logo design and are working on a tight budget, you should give this website a try and let us know how your experience went.

WIX, a FREE Flash website builder

consultingcents — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:46:57 +0000

We have recently added two flash sites to our portfolio using the WIX platform and found it to be very easy to use as a WYSIWYG flash platform and is sufficient for most needs, especially if you are heavy on the media and galleries. And what really makes WIX great is that it is FREE! Although the stability of the platform is definitely something WIX should consider. Other than that, it is a great platform for small business owners wanting to get a FREE flash website. They even have a E-Commerce package where you just drag and drop a shopping cart which is great too but that is a commercial service and would require a monthly fee. You can visit them at http://www.wix.com or take a look at http://www.wix.com/ConsultingCents/Consulting-Cents and http://www.wix.com/ConsultingCents/Sophisticated to see what Consulting Cents could create using WIX. The images below showcase what it generally looks like.

I hope you will find this information useful (especially on the cost savings part) and please let us know your feedback on this WIX platform.

Consulting Cents, a story about a small business during a recession

consultingcents — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:52:12 +0000

Consulting Cents is a social enterprise that focuses on utilizing technology, unique methodologies and international partnerships to bring down the costs of doing business while retaining quality standards through rigorous operational procedures and strict monitoring of work progress. Our ultimate goal is to provide a one-stop location for micro and small business owners to attend to all their business functions in an economical and time efficient way.

The origin of Consulting Cents was formed from real-life experiences leading to entrepreneurship, where start-up costs were found to be huge. As an entrepreneur, I believe in starting with a minimal cost base (if you can help it, I know for some capital-intensive industry, that is going to be difficult). But of course there are some costs that have to be incurred like logo design, business card design, business cards, website design, hosting, legal document draftings, name reservation, corporate incorporation fees and etc. All these necessary expenses were met with high quotes that seem to be putting a stretch on the budget. Thus, I have decided to find ways to reduce excesses or increase the value I receive for every dollar that I invest into my business and it is through these lessons that I can share how to help our clients reduce their start-up costs or at least make their dollars work really hard for them. At Consulting Cents, we help our clients achieve results, not just giving them empty promises.

At this point, you must be thinking what is our catch and why are we not trying to maximize our profits like what a corporation would do? First, we are not a normal corporation but a social enterprise. Our main concern is to help SMEs thrive in this challenging environment by offering affordable services that they need as we believe they are the unsung heroes of most economies due to their “last to fire” nature in-relation to human resources. Second, we not only value accounting profits, we also value highly consumer surpluses that a consumer get when they buy our services. For example, if you are willing to pay CAD$5,000 for a website and someone charges you that, you have none (basic Economics) and that’s where the Consulting Cents challenge comes in. We provide a 20-25% discount to any quote received by our clients from other developers given (a) we authenticate the quote and specifications for the website from the developer (we have ways to find this out) and (b) we accept the project. Of course, as this is also a business, we could not give it for free. Third, we would like to challenge the traditional business model of servicing this particular segment using custom-packaged solutions. We might succeed or fail but at least we tried to innovate and make a difference, who knows. We believe it is during these times that the opportunity cost of failure is the lowest.

At our current juncture, we are offering two services, which are web development and web maintenance. It is through our conversations with small business owners that we found owners to be highly responsive too. Consulting was the initial service offered but it came on deaf ears, thus we decided to bundle it with web development where we formulate the small business owners’ virtual extension around his or her business objectives. Why spend money on a website if it does not bring in additional sales? No offense, but non-tangibles are secondary to us and results are what we stand for, not excuses. If we are not able to deliver, we will not promise it.

Time permitting, future posts regarding our journey will be posted here with some tips and information we found on SMEs. We will also be posting useful discoveries of cost saving tools.

Conclusively, this is the humble beginnings of Consulting Cents, a story about a small business established during one of the worst Depressions since 1929.