• The company you work for still uses an internal postal system.
• Your bug-tracking software maintenance licence expired two years ago.
• Your account managers say “yes” to every client request.
• To book resources, you need to fill in a spreadsheet with six worksheets.
• Four colleagues in a meeting can’t tell you what an internally used acronym means.

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A piece of advice and “wisdom” I received from a certain nameless Director of Major Players in 2000 (now departed).

“Go back to college. Learn (formerly Macromedia, now Adobe) Lingo. Learn how to create CD-ROMs in Director.”

Fortunately, I didn’t take heed of this, was aware of an upcoming language called PHP and the CD-ROM has gone the way of the dinosaur.

I hate to quote Fleetwood Mac but sometimes it pays to “go your own way”.

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• Use the free version of everything, and when you run into the limitations tell the company you are working with that you are a startup – they will likely make an exception for you, small businesses hold a place is many people’s hearts.
• Barter your time (instead of money) for things you really need, such as trading blog posts with a company you want to get free services from.
• Become a customer of your customers – make non-monetary trades while you’re both growing, because you have being cash-strapped in common (only do this within reason).
• DO NOT pay for a PR agency or do trade shows, find ways to hack these traditional promotional tactics (contact me if you want ideas, or check out constraintmarketing.com).
• Use GetSatisfaction for your online forums, the free version is pretty awesome. +1 Zendesk comment someone mentioned already.
• Use Expensify for expense reporting (you’ll need this as soon as you have your first sales/marketing type).
• If you have investors (even angels), try to get your investors to let you work out of their office space. Chances are they are on the road a ton and won’t care.
• When you’re too big to borrow space, try a coffee shop that is dead during the day and make friends with the owner. They’ll appreciate the regular business.
• Coworking sounds expensive at “$500 a desk” but do it Hong Kong style, 2 or 3 people to a desk or coming in at different times during the day.
• When you rent a space, try to get the previous tenants to throw in the furniture they’re going to have to pay to dispose of anyway.
• Don’t do company credit-cards until you absolutely have to, the founding team should be willing to take the personal risk and be responsible for late fees (heaven forbid).
• Order promotional materials from Fedex or Office depot – a business account gets you 20% of everything. A single good-looking retractable standup banner looks professional, travels well, and lasted me over a year at our startup before we had more swag.
• Pick ONE promotional giveaway item, make it awesome, and order in bulk. This will save you money long term, while still building brand, but don’t both having pens, keychains, dongles, widgets, gadgets, etc. try just a t-shirt.
• Set a travel policy about the cost of flights, and take public transportation instead of cabs. Remember, you are cash poor and time rich (sort of). Look for deals like the JetBlue all-you-can-eat or Virgin America $39 flights, snag them, and figure out who to visit at those destinations.
• Buy a coffee maker and those little K-cups from Bed, Bath, and Beyond — you’ll save a TON on going for Starbucks, both in time and money. In SF a latte costs $4!
• Strike up a regular “rate” with a single restaurant where you take all your clients, potential investors, etc. so that you can still treat them well but save 20-30%.
• Use OpenVBX to set up a business phone line with a simple menu that forwards to various cell phones “press 1 for support, 2 for sales, etc.” and only pay for what you use.

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1. Statement of work (SOW)
2. Project plan (start/end dates, milestones, etc.)
3. Briefs or briefing documents
4. Cost estimates or budget sheets
5. Purchase order(s) (PO)
6. Invoices
7. Agendas (for meetings)
8. Status reports (weekly)
9. Issues/risks
10. Financial reconciliations
11. Receipts
12. Invoices
13. Functional specification
14. Technical specification
15. Site map
16. Wireframe schematics
17. Testing or quality assurance plans

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Software & Services
Industry Leader: Google Inc. (GOOG)
Annual revenue per employee: $1,093,892
Annual profit per employee: $214,768
Employees: 20,164

[Link]
Here is the full article:
The S&P 500′s Leanest Companies

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The all-governing document is typically the Statement of Work (SOW). This forms a binding agreement between the service company (agency) and the client. These should be written in a plain English style shunning technical terms and buzzwords. It acts as the overall framework for how the project hangs together, when things happen and what exactly they are.

The SOW document includes:

• project overview,
• background,
• business requirements,
• assumptions,
• dependencies,
• exclusions,
• start/end dates,
• milestones,
• project phases,
• client contacts,
• client approvals,
• fixed list of deliverables,
• list of items in scope/out of scope,
• known issues and risks,
• signatures,
• payment details

Following on from this, there is ‘everything else’. This can include some or all of the following:

• Project number (for internal management)
• Estimate
• Project contacts
• Functional specification document
• Technical specification document
• User experience (UX) wireframes, site maps, taxonomy, user journeys
• Creative concepts
• Written creative brief
• Copy document
• Translations/localisation document
• Strategy/planning document
• Media plan
• Search engine optimisation/marketing plan
• PR/Marketing plan
• Maintenance plan
• Support plan
• Reference material including links, examples, guidelines, standards
• Saved approvals (save emails with client approvals)
• Project plan
• Key dates/milestones
• Weekly status report document listing ‘traffic light’ status, executive summary, issues and risks
• Staffing/resource plan
• Deployment/integration plan
• Tracking tags brief document including links
• Analytics detail including code
• Model release form
• List of stock photography w/ rights usage and expiry dates spreadsheet
• QA/Testing spreadsheet
• Meeting agendas
• Source control details
• Logins with usernames and passwords
• URLs including country-specific names
• Domain names including owners
• Hosting including technical contacts
• Software licences – for specific purchases
• Third party assets
• Purchase orders (POs)/Receipts
• Recurring costs (monthly/annual)
• Rate card
• Financial reconciliations
• Handover notes (from one project manager or colleague to another)
• Scans of other documentation, sketches, etc.

I’ve saved this list for my own personal use but please feel free to let me know if I missed anything important or if you want to use this information elsewhere.

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Here are a few of the guilty parties than constantly email with jobs that are not relevant. Notice how most of them come from one company:

Sara Clark s.clark@timothyjamesconsulting.com
Ben Gill b.gill@timothyjamesconsulting.com
Richard Haggarty richard@timothyjamesconsulting.com
Rory Mullins r.mullins@timothyjamesconsulting.com
Christine Christodoulou christine@timothyjamesconsulting.com
Dan Wardle d.wardle@timothyjamesconsulting.com
Wakeford, Andrew andrew.Wakeford@hays.com
Damian Chana dchana@rethink-recruitment.com

[Update 04/04/2010]
Paul Fraser paul.fraser@ecrmpeople.com

[Update 15/04/2010]
Katie Lennon katie@ecomrecruitment.com

[Update 23/04/2010]
Lucy Haslam lhaslam@itrecsolutions.co.

[Update 11/05/2010]
Jonathan Swithinbank j.swithinbank@timothyjamesconsulting.com

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In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

- The Google Apps Team

This will come as music to the ears of long-suffering interface developers who have had to struggle with numerous CSS hacks, the lack of support for alpha transparency in PNG images and security problems – to support a nine-year old product reluctantly supported by Microsoft.

Roll on 01 March 2010!

[Link]
Wikipedia entry for Internet Explorer 6

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In searching for a simple, open source (and free) Subversion client for OS X, I came across RapidSVN. I’m using RapidSVN, a multi-platform GUI front-end for the Subversion revision system.

RapidSVN is an open-source client for Windows, Linux, OS X and other *nixes. It’s simple and functional but requires third-party tools for functionality such as visual Diffs. Its written in C++ and executes native code, so it’s the fastest cross-platform client.

While the user interface is not as nice as Versions, it’s lightweight feel and zero cost fits my current needs.

[Link]
RapidSVN

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