When & How: Wednesday Feb 17 – Register Now!

Accelerate 2010 - The Best Business Event of the year!

This will be tight game raising stuff

If you’ve had your time making plenty of mistakes and starting businesses and now want to get into serious and focused growth mode, then Accelerate 2010 is set to make sure you start 2010 with a fresh growth focus from people doing it well right now.

With Rod and Andy Lark leading the way, this will be a no BS, straight up, put into immediate action day that helps you raise your game and sets up an increasing network of senior entrepreneurs who know how to build and sustain successful businesses. Register up at 0to60.com.

Then the day ends with an Open Air Concert At Black Barn, where Kiwi music legends Tim Finn, Bic Runga and Dave Dobbyn will again take the stage together! Choice…

Event Backed by Xero and promo site which looks hot designed by Mogul.

If you charge out your time, and are familiar with super simple social media tools like twitter, then you’ve just found the fastest and most easiest way to turn your time into money.

Here are 2 Big things Minutedock does to hit the bottom line and increase profitability and ability to scale for billable hour and services businesses.

Micro-bill lots of clients in Parallel

Because you can quickly log every piece of work you do in MinuteDock, it’s much easier to allocate and bill for small amounts of our time over many clients, enabling you to support more clients in parallel. And with no overhead, you can now knock out a dozen 15 or 30 minute jobs, and make them profitable! Key when you’re in the services game.

Customers know EXACTLY what they’re paying for

With Minute Dock, there’s no scurrying to pull together invoices for clients or having to tally up and detail whats been done at the end of a month. Instead you’ve got a simple clean audit trail so you and your clients can see exactly what chunks of value you’ve delivered – Chunks of value = cash. Also great if you’re managing a team and want everyone working on things that can be billed everyday.

The Crew Behind MinuteDock

MinuteDock has been designed, developed and is backed and supported by some pretty smart cats Nik Wakelin & Oliver Clarke from Code to Customer and James Nisbet from Bandit Design and a partner of mine in Challenge for Change.

Small Business and Personal Finance direct link

The rest of the world aside, as a country powered by small businesses, New Zealand alone has over 400,000 business owners, and depending on what numbers you get, around three quarters of these are sole traders – 1 man bands or couples. To many of these people, the family money and budget are based around the business, and all financial decisions in either business or personal completely effect each other.

Xero Sharpens it’s Sales Strategy

So along side the massive and increasing opportunities in personal finance, Xero is stepping into a very strategic position with small business owners and will be able to capture these people as customers through either their business or personal finances, then convert them into a customer on the other… a well oiled machine…

For a quick video teaser of Xero Personal

Major hit to the competition

MYOB was subject to a takeover by a private equity firm at the end of 2008, which sparked the move of previous founder and board member Craig Winkler, and no doubt a shift in culture for the business at a time when Xero is just warming up. The ability of private equity to manage a business which needs to rapidly innovate in a competitive environment remains to be seen, but it’s clear that the now private equity lead MYOB will continue to face challenges in finding and retaining key talent and innovation, and with the visionary founder now moving his money into Xero, the new era of online accounting lead by Xero is in full swing.

Existing investor top-up

The shares will be issued at 90 cents in a round open to all existing investors, so while Xero don’t need your additional money, if you bought in at launch, nows a good time to top up and bring your average buy price down slightly. With a strong growth curve, a freshly capitalised balance sheet, a foothold in New Zealand, the UK and Australia, and momentum building from a base of regular customers, Xero is well on it’s way as a powerful global business that’s changing the way small businesses roll in the new world economy.

Big congrats to the Xero crew, this is a big win for the industry and a great story for the NZX at a time when capital is generally tight.

Multi-company goodness

While I’m writing a quick note on Xero, here’s my current experience – I’m involved in half a dozen businesses right now with various shareholders and customer relationships here and in the UK, and just loving having them all humming on Xero and PlanHQ. With recurring invoices setup between the businesses for inter-company transactions passed straight though the Xero Network into the Accounts Payable of each businesses accounts means accounts admin is down and transparency on our base cashflow forecast is rocking.

Show me the money

I’ve run PlanHQ on Xero since we started as one of the first super early beta customers, and as someone who lives on information was pretty happy from day one that at least I finally had my last set of business information online and accessable from everywhere, which is the only place I want my business information as I travel the world, work from home. I appreciate I’m bleeding edge, but this was 18 months ago, and Xero has come forward in leaps and bounds and is a great platform for managing your accounts. Xero continues to power forward, something I’m pretty sure we can all accept doesn’t happen with any competing package software products, and you can now import your chart of accounts from MYOB to help get you over the one-off switch.

I can’t believe that anyone actually likes the idea of having their accounting information sitting on a PC somewhere in the office where they have to goto to access, or getting an export of the file from their accounts person. Going online with your accounts is not rocket science, its just smart simple business.

Money Life on Xero

Bank data comes in automagically, our accounts person Komal codes them then since all of our customer billing and payments are automated through PlanHQ, we just feed Xero with monthly sales totals for International and NZ/GST customers, and thats it, accounts are up to date, Komal can to the leg work, and I can live my life around the P&L and watch us get closer to break-even. If you’re serious about money, then managing your accounts online is the only way to go, you’ll never look back, and there’s alot more coming in the future.

This isn’t about supporting a cool local company and group of people anymore, its just about managing your finances the best way you can to grow your business, so get amongst it!

See Also: The Herald

1. Solve a problem – is my idea a business?

2. Get Shareholding and agreement right

3. Have your pitch and your pitch document

4. Get Angel Investment

5. Selling Globally

6. Selling Strategy

Stand up and be counted

Along with a bunch of other articles it covers what have been picked as NZ’s top 10 online startups in an article by Peter Griffin. If you’re surprised not to see yourself in there, then email Patrick  founder of Startup Media at patrick at start-up.co.nz, he wants to know who you are, and so do the rest of us!

Using the power of media

I’ve been chatting to Patrick for quite a few months as StartUp are also filming a TV series which will air this year, and PlanHQ have been getting followed around a bit and getting some of us making it happen captured on film. With nothing staged, just raw as it happens action, this is the sort of video footage I like to see and be part of, you learn a lot watching others… and even yourself.

I had the pleasure of launching PlanHQ at the DEMO conference and watching Ponoko doing the same at Techcrunch40, and really look forward to seeing this happen next year at least 5 times across the various conferences, which we’ll start discussing in the new year. Silver Stripe have been doing work with Google, and there’s been heaps of other outcomes across the industry and another year of making it happen for the entreprenurs and teams building their businesses. I’ve only mentioned a few stories that are extra close to me because I’m tired and need a break too, but you know who you are and what you’ve done.

Lets make 08 the year of raising the bar, we’ve got the energy, lets be really smart about how we operate this coming year, and get some big results.

Enjoy a holiday, recharge, have some space from your businesses and let your position roll back into your mind in a new light… Who knows just what we can all pull off in the next 12 months.

The Role of The Product Strategy

Product roles are often overlooked or misunderstood in software businesses, People often operate on the assumption that you have developers, designers and commercial people, and that this is enough to succeed. Rod talks about managing product development here. But the reality is you need to focus on building a product and not a technology or piece of software, so you have to have this reflected in your team structure and roles, whenever I see a software business with a development manager and no product manager driving things, the red flag goes up immediately. I’ve played the role of product lead through-out my career as I found myself surrounded by some very talented developers and designers but few people who can help bring them together around a clear product direction. You do need amazing designers and developers, but these people have enough work cut out for themselves and need to be complimented by someone who can see into both camps and ahead into the market and help pull together an experience that people love.