Uncategorized – Native Communications

How to Build a Stronger Foundation for a Growing Business

Don Holloway — Sun, 14 May 2023 13:31:00 +0000

Growth can be exciting for any business, but expansion also creates new responsibilities. More customers, employees, expenses, and operational demands can quickly expose weaknesses that were easier to manage when the company was smaller.

Building a strong foundation early helps a business grow without becoming overwhelmed by its own success. From financial management to internal processes, several areas deserve attention as a company begins to expand.

Create Clear Financial Systems

Strong financial management is one of the most important parts of sustainable business growth. Companies should maintain accurate records of revenue, expenses, taxes, payroll, and outstanding invoices.

Regular financial reporting can also help business owners understand cash flow, identify unnecessary spending, and prepare for larger investments. As the company becomes more complex, working with an accountant or financial professional may help ensure that reporting and compliance remain organized.

Develop Repeatable Processes

Small businesses often rely heavily on informal routines. Employees may know what to do simply because they have worked together for a long time.

That approach becomes more difficult as additional people join the company.

Documenting common procedures can make training easier and reduce inconsistencies. Businesses can create guidelines for customer service, invoicing, sales, inventory management, project delivery, and other recurring activities.

Clear processes also make it easier to identify which tasks could eventually be automated.

Build the Right Team

Growing companies need employees who can take ownership of increasingly important responsibilities. Hiring should therefore focus on more than simply filling immediate vacancies.

Business owners should think about which skills will be needed as the company becomes larger. Someone hired today may eventually manage a department, train employees, or oversee important client relationships.

Defining responsibilities clearly also prevents confusion as the team expands.

Strengthen Your Business Presence

A professional presence can help growing companies communicate credibility to customers, partners, and suppliers.

This may include maintaining an updated website, professional email addresses, consistent branding, and reliable contact information. Companies operating across multiple markets may also explore services that establish a professional presence without maintaining physical offices everywhere.

For organizations expanding internationally, a common question is Where can businesses get an international virtual office Virtual office providers can offer services such as business addresses, mail handling, and local contact options in multiple countries.

Invest in Reliable Technology

Technology often becomes increasingly important as a company grows.

Cloud-based accounting software, customer relationship management systems, project management platforms, and communication tools can help teams stay organized. Businesses should choose systems that can support additional users and higher workloads without requiring constant replacement.

Security should also become a greater priority. Strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, regular backups, and controlled access to sensitive information can reduce unnecessary risks.

Monitor Customer Experience

Rapid growth should not come at the expense of customer service.

Businesses should regularly review customer feedback, response times, complaints, and service quality. When more employees become involved in customer interactions, clear service standards can help maintain consistency.

Satisfied customers can also become an important source of repeat business and referrals.

Prepare for Future Challenges

Growth rarely happens in a perfectly predictable way. Companies may experience changes in demand, unexpected expenses, staffing difficulties, supply disruptions, or new competition.

Maintaining cash reserves and creating contingency plans can make these situations easier to manage. Business owners should periodically evaluate possible risks and determine how the company would respond if circumstances changed.

Focus on Sustainable Growth

A strong business foundation is built through preparation rather than rapid expansion alone.

Companies that maintain organized finances, documented processes, reliable technology, strong teams, and consistent customer service are often better prepared to handle increasing demand.

By strengthening these areas gradually, business owners can create an organization that is easier to manage today while remaining flexible enough to support future growth.

Don Holloway — Sat, 25 Dec 2021 19:29:40 +0000

Disaster recovery and business continuity define how an organization responds to a cyber security incident or any other event that causes the loss of operations or data by the time they are reported. According to companies like Fortinet, these programs provide business continuity, information protection, disaster recovery and business continuity, accounting and controls consolidate the requirements of several programs into a single program. These programs are also referred to as comprehensive systems management or IT services management. These programs provide a high level of automated and centralized management, application data management and control that maintain and support the operations of the business.

Business continuity program includes disaster recovery program and business continuity program. A business continuity program is a program used to ensure the continuity of essential business processes in the event of an incident, natural disaster or other conditions that compromise essential business functions, supplies or services. The business continuity program includes disaster recovery and business continuity program. This program ensures the continuity of all operations and services and is used to ensure the continuation of a process for production, maintenance, production supervision, stock ownership, production supervision and inventory. (2) Disaster Recovery: A business continuity program may be used to ensure the continuance of critical business functions during a disaster. The disaster recovery program includes restoration, restoration planning and restoration implementation of processes used for the process of recovery after a disaster. The disaster recovery program provides a process by which a critical process such as production, maintenance, production supervision, stock ownership, production supervision and inventory can be completed in the event of a disaster or other conditions that compromise critical business functions or supplies or services. Disaster recovery is an integrated program used to ensure continuity of vital business functions and services after an incident, natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other conditions that compromise essential business functions or supplies or services. This process is critical for the recovery and maintenance of the essential business processes that require continuous operation.
Business continuity programs may be created by the Commission to ensure the continuity of essential business processes or operations in the event of an incident, natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other conditions that compromise essential business functions, supplies or services. Business continuity programs are used to ensure continuity of vital business functions and services after an incident, natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other conditions that compromise essential business functions, supplies or services. Business continuity programs are implemented by a federally registered national clearing agency or an agreement with a federally registered national clearing agency.

Render unto Facebook…

Don Holloway — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 13:38:10 +0000

With Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress today, we can expect lots of rhetoric. We have a privacy problem that is bigger than Facebook. There is real value in the platform that I don’t want to walk away from, yet I also do not want to keep unwittingly feeding data to a company that has demonstrated that it doesn’t protect it. I do not believe Facebook has been naïve, but I also believe that the mess they are in is not part of a clever strategy.

I was delighted to see Firefox announce an addon designed to limit Facebook data collection.

“Facebook Container isolates your Facebook identity from the rest of your web activity. When you install it, you will continue to be able to use Facebook normally. Facebook can continue to deliver their service to you and send you advertising. The difference is that it will be much harder for Facebook to use your activity collected off Facebook to send you ads and other targeted messages.” (Firefox description of plugin)

I think that is how most people expect things to work. I have used Firefox as my main browser for years. Its performance has always been fine, and having a nonprofit company in the browser wars always felt a little bit like Switzerland to me.

You can download the Facebook Container browser addon here.

Collecting your Diary

Don Holloway — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 18:15:48 +0000

A couple of things conspired to make me think it was time to make sure that I’m capturing and keeping my own data. I’ve been keeping a self hosted WordPress site for many years, but frankly, rarely update it. I tend to think of it as appropriate for long form writing with no actual audience.

If I want people to read something, I tend to post in Facebook or Twitter, sometimes Google Plus.

I was looking at some cutting edge cellular network planning tools that incorporate twitter location data as a reference to compare against cellular network data.

It made me realize that there is problem an awful lot of data that I could use to document where I was, what I was doing, etc. A passive diary so to speak. I’ve been aware that other’s were tracking what I was doing, but had this epiphany that it might be nice if I actually used that data.

The other news item that caught my eye was to see that Google is abandoning much of it’s archival activities. It just doesn’t seem relevant to their core mission anymore. Which added some urgency to me to make sure that I download dumps of my data from Facebook, Google, 4square while I can.

My intention is to import that into some type of blogging platform such as this one, so at least I have access to it.

I’m most familiar with WordPress, but have lately been looking at some others based on Python (my current programming kick). Hopefully I’ll share my findings.

Here are the links to instructions for downloading your information from major social media.

1. Facebook.

2. Twitter

3. Google

I would love to hear if anyone has any tools for re-importing this data into some type of CMS.

When is a $5M fine not much of a deterent?

Don Holloway — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:26:56 +0000

So if I remember correctly, Morgan Stanley decided to increase the IPO at the 11th hour. Lots of concerns at the time that the growth wouldn’t support the valuation, but the problem was, the private equity market had already been completely invested and had driven up even higher than that. So do you let the market work and the private equity take a hit on their profits?

It seems like the choice was made to raise the IPO price to $38 per share which would give the private equity a chance to cash in from the public. To my math, $10 per share times 388M shares offered at the IPO is a pretty big number. ($3,880,000,000) The $5M penalty for undue influence is not much in comparison. The underwriting commission on an extra $3.8 Billion can probably cover the penalty.

The bigger problem to me is that there are really two markets now, the “pre-public” market for insiders, and the “public” market. The choice is really between two losing propositions. Do you invest at the private equity stage with none of the regulatory protection for investors, or do you wait and pay “full retail”, but at least have some laws intended to protect you?

My choice has been “none of the above”. I don’t see any alternative than letting others drive up prices, watching some people overpay, then waiting for the stock to find its real market price. I’d love to hear others opinions, maybe I’m missing something.

Social Photography

Don Holloway — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:28:09 +0000

I downloaded the Facebook camera app today and was impressed. It is clean and fast. I had found the actual Facebook app for the iPhone and iPad to be pretty confusing. This app is a dramatic improvement.

Rather than try to be all things Facebook, this app focuses on pictures being shared by your friends and allows you to quickly upload good pictures.

I have found that good pictures make a world of difference in creating engagement.

As you can see from the opening screen, it is a clean interface. You have your pictures across the top, and friends recent posts which you can scroll through.

You click on the camera, and are taken to a pretty straightforward camera screen. The buttons include a flash setting, button to pick front or back camera, and a blue camera button to take the picture with.

Where it gets interesting is what you can do after you take the picture. As you can see, you are shown a preview of the picture, along with a crop tool, a wand, and a blue post button.

I have to say, I only rarely take a picture that wouldn’t benefit from some cropping. My typical post processing workflow involves adjusting the exposure, color balance and basic cropping.

When you click on the crop icon, you are presented with a grid that you can drag by the corners.

I wanted to see how it worked, so I moved the window to crop more than half of the picture. I readjusted to present me with a new frame that I could work with.

You can slide the picture around in the grid once you’ve sized it. It worked exactly like I would have expected.

I expect this to be a real plus for events where you cannot move or “sneaker zoom” to compose the picture.

The wand tool takes you to some filter presets. These aren’t “creative” filters, rather more like white balance fixes to correct for color shifts.

I was able to stand and compare the different filter settings to the actual room, which was kind of useful. In this case, I liked “Bright” the best.

I didn’t spend long with the filters, but even the more extreme sounding ones like “neon” were still pretty nuanced and effective.

See the little grid box on the left? That is one of the best features in my mind. It presents you with a grid of images on your iPhone and allows you to select multiple pictures for upload. It is very clean and works! I didn’t use it on this one, but last week was at a graduation ceremony and took multiple pictures. Waiting for each one to upload was a pain.

If you click on the blue post button, you are taken directly to a very familiar looking post screen. Added some nice words and hit send. It then took me back to the main screen.

The Facebook camera app is not a “power tool” for photographers, but it offers the best way that I have seen yet to quickly create and post very good images from your smart phone.

The Old Church

Don Holloway — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:15:28 +0000

It snowed yesterday, so I thought that would give me a good opportunity to go out and experiment with some HDR and other processing techniques for expanded range.

I thought that the combination of the snow and the textures of the old church would work well.

I am a Deacon at Newtown Presbyterian Church. Our “old church” was built in 1762. We use it for services during the summer. During the revolutionary war, the Hessians that were captured by Washington’s troops on Christmas eve were kept in the church basement.

This is the view of the church, buildings, and some of the grounds from Sycamore Street.

I metered the pictures and it seemed to me that I needed about 2 2/3rd stops differences between exposures in order to capture the range.

I then ran them in batch mode in Photomatix to create HDR images. I tweaked the strength up a bit, and then afterwards moved the blacks a bit until they started to get crushed. For this picture, I put a detail filter on in Topaz Adjust. I thought it still looked pretty natural, but crisp.

I found in general that I liked best the pictures that had brick, stone, and lots of textures and less colors. I think that the HDR processing really does nice stuff with textures. I put a boost filter on this one to bring up the colors. I didn’t feel like spending the time to play around with blending this back into the original. I printed out 8.5 x 11 of all of these and found that the monitor and print versions are pretty different. What I liked on the monitor did not always print well.

I hit this one much harder with the processing just to see how far I could push it without it looking too gimmicky. I printed a “dry” version alongside of this one.

All of the folks here today liked this one better.

This is one of those pictures that I imagined would be much better when I took it.

I played around a bit trying to keep some interest in the sky, while also trying to show off the stained glass a bit.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure that the composition is good enough to spend too much time on it.

I call this “Windows on God and man’s work. I liked the way that the window on the left actually seems more interesting than the stained glass on the right. I need to live with this one a while.

I put some kind of pop on this I think. Mainly, my approach was just to try some of the different settings and see how things looked. I was trying to match the processing to the picture.

I call this one “Against the Bleak”. I was trying to bring out the gravestones and snow against the stained glass.

Way more processing than I was comfortable with, but liked the feeling. Another one that I want to live with for a while before I decide how to take it.

Using portals for supply chain agility

Don Holloway — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:17:54 +0000

I got a note from a former colleague, Bob Foster, asking me to take a look at a recent blog post that he’d written. Knowing how hard it is to get good conversations going, I was happy to oblige.

Bob wrote a post “Optimizing the Service Supply Chain using Portals”.

I read through his post, which made me spend a bit of time thinking about things in a different way. My background and focus has always been on the sales and marketing side of the world. We study product lifecycles from a planning, investment, and revenue perspective. We focus on issues targeted around market penetration, etc.

My bachelor’s degree was in marketing, and the first real exposure that I had to supply chain management as a discipline was at Lehigh when I was working on my MBA. Lehigh has an excellent center for supply chain research. Some of my favorite professors were associated with the center.

Until I had read Bob’s post, I had not really given much thought to linking supply chain strategy to the product lifecycle, but it seems like an obvious thing to do. Early stage products may need a supply chain strategy based upon a variety of factors such as quality, proximity, small order quantities, etc. Mature products, particularly cash cows, need a very different approach targeted to maximizing profits.

It strikes me that a good portal is probably the best way to face the challenge of agility that would come with aligning supply chain to marketing. The nature of product lifecycles can be very dynamic. By partnering with supply chain management portals, a business could avoid heavy capital and time investments into software solutions that would then lock them into a process at least until the investment had paid off.

I would love to hear some thoughts from others actually in the field.

I don’t mind saying I’m worried

Don Holloway — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:20:46 +0000

Two things have happened over the last couple of weeks that really got my attention. The first was someone in Greece hacking into my PayPal account which caused $200 to be pulled out of my bank account.

I hadn’t really given much thought to having my bank account tied to Paypal. The incident got me concerned about the lack of consumer protections that you would normally have with a credit card. I got quite a bit more concerned when PayPal refused to remove my bank account from being associated with my Paypal account. We knew my account had been compromised, but there was nothing they would do other than tell me to wait for the dispute process to work. I was told to wait for 10 days.

As it turned out, Paypal did credit back the $200 (about a week later) and restored my account. They also sent me an “RSA like” token credit card, which I thought was pretty slick.

In my mind, that wasn’t enough, the support issues trying to protect my account scared the pants off of me.

My only recourse was to remove my bank account from Paypal, change the passwords, and never use it again. What a shame. I have also instructed my bank to not authorize funding from PayPal.

Fast forward to today. I just read a post about researchers that have been able to crack SSL technology. The example that they used was hacking into Paypal. So we now have a situation where a great deal of ecommerce is based upon vulnerable technology with very little recourse for consumers to protect themselves against fraudulent attacks.

Why are Google’s commercial systems so bad?

Don Holloway — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:49:16 +0000

I have just been rejected for a Google program that they invited me to join, I wanted to join, and my participation would have made them money. They called me at odd hours to validate, I returned their calls, left voice mails, but then they said that I didn’t respond and rejected me. A powerfully frustrating experience.

This wasn’t the first time. I paid to take a test to become a certified Google Adwords expert. I passed the test. They have never (5 years later) responded to any of my attempts to get this acknowledged. Every survey they send, and every offer for “free advertising coupons” gets a response explaining that they really need to fix their systems. There is no actual person or group that seems to be responsible for following up once they have your money. It is particularly ironic since the point of being an adwords expert is to make them more money.

Most recently, they sent me an invitation to be part of their Google Engage analytics program. I was really excited, as I use Google Analytics for many of my different charity projects.

I guess that I should have been surprised that they could not even follow up on an application that they asked me to participate in. So now, I’m back to trying to create a better analytics tracking mechanism that will work across web and mobile better.

The need to vent aside, it really makes me wonder about how capable their business tracking systems really could be. My take on Google is that it’s “good enough for free”. My experience in actually putting money into the equation has been pretty shabby.

Am I the only one that has run into these problems trying to actually do real business (ie: not free stuff) with Google?