Third Tuesday February 2009 – Steve Jagger on “How to Grow Your Business”
Steve Jagger gave an awesome talk about how their business went completely virtual, and described the kind of tools they used to do that. Tris did an awesome liveblog, also using Cover It Lie, for Third Tuesday. The core Reachd/Ubertor team is in Vancouver and various other location (DT Vancouver, Burnaby, Whistler, Dominican Republic).
Morning conversations on Google Video Chat. The majority of their businesses is through GChat and GMail. Most companies who have employees elsewhere – you don’t get the emotion behind. Video really allowed them to do that, to bring the . Yammer – they use it to bring Google Video to the next level. It’s like Twitter, a closed conversation with only their team. Even if you have an office, Mailboxes Etc. allows you to have a stable mailing address.
Google’s Grand Central (from Google) – if you can, you should sign up. GotVMail – similar service.
SlimTimer - allows you to track your time. It’s more than just time-sheets, where you are tracking “I was at this meeting for an hour”. You track EVERYTHING. In their business, they do track every single task, trying to automate everything.
Meetup.com - A great one for sales people. They used to have a sales team of about 18 people. They became the educator – they brought speakers to educate the real estate people. When they compare the products, they compare pricing and stuff because they are bringing speakers and allows them to go to a different level.
Business video – Everybody should be shooting video (whatever you’re passionate about, throw the videos, people will embed them). Most of Steve’s speaking engagements come from his videos being watched.
Consultants - Seth Godin (25 guys flew to him) – Shane Gibson – runs a 12 week, 72 hour bootcamp. So Steve and his business partner enrolled in the course, and it was good. They just wanted to get the answers from Shane’s wisdom and insight. After the second day they talked to Shane about whether he would come and help their sales team. Consultants are important, it’s worth it to grab people who knows something about the stuff.
Thank you cards - Write a ‘thank you card’. Be grateful. There are people who actually thank Steve and his company because of their ‘thank you’ cards! They sub-contract the card writing to a woman who makes sure that the card goes out, and it’s something that can be outsourced and/or automate it. People really like thank you cards (shocking!)
Press - It’s good to be in the press. Steve and his company are always looking to be on the press. The fact that you were there, in the press, it’s what matters. The fact is, you are IN the media (it gives you leverage).
Live Chat - it’s pretty much the best thing, ever. If customers need support, they can help solve them. They can find out the browser that the customer is using, etc.
Wiki tools - Works really well if you have everybody trained to find the answers on the Ubertor wiki.
Setting up people or workers so that they can outsource. In this case, they might need to have an office (set up an outsource office for businesses).
They used to use BaseCamp and HighRise – for project management.
- Invoices – FreshBooks
- CRM – You could use HighRise
- Web-based Accounting – Clarity Accounting.
Ubertor and Reachd are more expensive than their competitors, generally speaking. Their advantage is not by price, it’s by service.
Even though I didn’t liveblog the event, I wanted to get this post out on time. Thanks to Steve for a great talk.
Related posts:
- The BC Healthy Living Alliance Walk (Tuesday Apr 28th, 2009)
- The Vancouver Bloggers Meetup is this coming Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
- Rebecca Bollwitt (Miss604) on branding: Third Tuesday recap
- Live-blogging Third Tuesday with Joe Solomon
- Third Tuesday with Joe Solomon – that is today, Tuesday!
