Hi all,

We get the same question over and over again. We want to use your software but we don’t have a website. What can we do?

this is a good question with simple answer. Run it on iQ Desk server! many small businesses and freelancer just don’t have a website. And if they have not always they are familiar with terms like hosting, mySQL server, FTP and all other tech words. They don’t want to care about backups and the size of the database. They just want to use iQ Desk.

For all these people we designed a package that takes out all the hassle of installation (although the installation is very simple), backups and understanding how a website works. For a tiny monthly fee you can use iQ Desk on our server and even the domain will look like your brand: http://yourbrand.iqdesk.co.uk

There are a lot of benefits choosing this method:
1) It is cost effective. You don’t need to pay the full price to get iQ Desk. You just pay tiny fee each month and you can opt-out when ever you want. No 12 months contracts, 30 days notice or any other ‘terms & conditions’
2) We take care of all the maintenance so you don’t need to worry about backups and server optimization
3) You can still access it from all over the world as long as you have an internet connection.

To get more details please read our product page or contact us if you have any questions. To sign up and get 14 days free click here.

Hi Readers,

Today, I want to discuss something a bit different. I want to remind you of a fast becoming lost skill. The skill that is being quickly replaced by emails. But a skill that can get you far better results than any other type of communication out there.

One of THE most important skills you have to master to be a success in your business, to take your business up another level, to increase the potential of your business by 100s% and create limitless opportunities for yourself is to know how to do good old fashioned networking.

We, at iQ Desk, see it over and over again with our business, how simple networking can open up endless doors to destinations we haven’t even thought of.

You have probably heard about networking many times before and just tossed the idea aside and never given it a second thought. Thought it to be too time consuming, or too boring. Well, this is mistake number ONE and it is a very costly mistake.

When you are out there meeting new people and targeting your niche, your market, or even your existing clients, you’re literally keeping your business alive.

As a freelancer or any business owner as a matter of fact, you have already realized that you are not alone out there, there is competition. Competition can be fierce sometimes and hard to overcome.

Now, think about the businesses that always succeed, think about the people in your field that seem to make a fortune while others who have the EXACT same skills don’t get anywhere near.. These people are probably being out there, promoting themselves and their business! They are joining endless seminars, conferences, meeting their clients face to face, sending emails and thank you notes and creating a credible name for themselves and their business. And most importantly, building their contact list again and again and again and again! Just by the effect of meeting people who know other people who know other people who know.. In one contact you may have met dozens or even hundreds more. Do you start getting the drift of endless opportunities?

How do you network? Once you have mastered the art of networking, it becomes a second nature and the more you do it, the more comfortable you are. Even if you are the shy type, or you find engaging in small talk or even socializing terrifying, (Some types of freelance work can be very lonely), you need to remember four things:

1. Prepare, prepare, prepare

Before you attend a conference, a meeting or any other social network event, be sure to get ready. A Rooky mistake is to show up not doing your homework. Make sure you know what the conference is about, who the speakers are, if any, the most relevant and latest talk in your field and your main competitors.

2. Get a goal of contacting at least 3 people

There is no much point if you do get out of the house and off your desk to a social networking event, without actually meeting people. If this doesn’t come naturally to you, set a goal to speak with three different people whom you do not know and get their contact details, remember! A smile and a bit of small talk can go a long way when it comes to business. If you are not good in having a small talk and many people don’t know how to do it and resort to talking about the weather or the plans for the weekend, prepare a speech before you get out of the house. Just a little bit of interesting topics to discuss that are relevant to your field of expertise and maybe a little bit of a sales pitch of yourself. Yes, you are there to make contacts that will bring you money! Oh..Yes and don’t forget eye contact. It builds credibility, oozes confidence and makes others view you as a professional and expert in your field.

3. Understand who you’re talking to

People are different. Some have a good sense of humor; some won’t move their lips when they hear a good joke. Some like to talk about themselves, some like to listen. It is very important when you meet new people to understand quickly what type of person you’re talking to. If the person in front of you, is a bit of the philosophical type, try not to show off all your analytical skills while you engage in your few minutes yet potentially long term relationship small talk. If they like to tell stories, try to ask them more questions to encourage them to tell more stories. Make sure you are remembered for the right reasons! If you can master this skill, you may end up with a client for life and sometimes even with a friend.

4. Follow up

Its people’s nature to show a lot of enthusiasm in these events and make promises to each other, but you will be surprised just how many people don’t get anything out of them. After you had met these three contacts and got their business cards, make sure you emailed them and thank them for their time. Also mention that it was a pleasure to have met them. This is called building relationships. Remember! If they now need a freelancer, they will most likely go to you first.

5. Look the part

And last but not least, look the part. Dress and talk appropriately in these conferences, be friendly and smile. Research show that lucky people tend to smile more often.

If you don’t go out there, you might have missed on making a fortune!

I want to tell you here about someone I have known for years. He is an acquaintant of mine. I am not calling him a friend because we are so far apart in our attitudes to life and everything else really, so we keep falling off over anything!

He used to owns a small business , but  before that we used to work together about 10 years ago for a very large investment bank. He was my boss, and was quite a nasty one. You know the kind of bosses who  would time every second you go out for lunch. Count the number of times you went to the toilets. Made you miserable by staring at your screen whenever he was passing by. It was horrible, so I never took any liking to this guy. Anyway, I was working in one of the off-shore branches and it so happens that the branch got shut down because it wasn’t profitable enough.

We were all 20 something and very eager to climb the corporate ladder, but since the place we used to live at the time was very small there weren’t many opportunities. So many of us opened our own businesses, basically doing what we used to do on a consultancy basis.

I moved to London and continued working my way up the corporate ladder in other large corporations. But this guy stayed there and opened his own financial consultancy firm. Initially, he did very well for himself. He got his old connections back and advised his old clients for a couple of years. This got him floating quite nicely, but then there was a serious decline in his business and he was about to go broke.  He failed to recruit new clients, he was running out of money very quickly and had to fire his old friends who worked as his office manager and a fellow consultant. He was there on his own, probably very frustrated and clueless.

Last year I went back there for a short holiday, I was shopping for new sunglasses and when I was about to pay, I looked up the cashier and there he was! embarrassed and smiling. “You haven’t changed a bit” he said.

I felt for the guy, after all, he used to be my ruthless boss and now he is there taking my money while I was shopping for my Gucci’s.  It was early evening, so I waited for his shift to end and we sat down for coffee. I genuinely wanted to know what went wrong.

And! as it turns out, this guy did everything wrong. He made many mistakes that small business owners make, and the inevitable consequences have emerged as expected.  He was so immersed in his work and his clients that he never had the chance to look at the business and where the business was going.  He never even had the time to sit down and think about his business model. What his unique selling point was and how he was going to increase profits and get more clients. He had no online presence at all. There he was trying to run a business and had no website to begin with. Literally!,every mistake in the book! His excuse was…”I never had the time”…

Well, you know what I always say, make the time, automate your work, it will repay itself many times over. Get yourself a professionally designed website. Get yourself noticed. Don’t just expect work to turn up out of the clear blue sky. In nowadays, you really need to have the complete package to succeed. The alternative is just not there if you are working for yourself. There is NO alternative.

With this in mind, we decided at iQ Desk, to offer our readers a complete package of a professionally designed website through our parent company S-Development with the iQ Desk automation software. These package should really give you the edge to compete in the 21st century. We truly want all of you out there to succeed.

Last week I happened to watch the film “Revolutionary Road”. Now, I don’t know what you thought of it, but personally I thought it was a mediocre film with particularly bad acting. But hey, it is just me…

What made me think of this film this morning? I will tell you. There is one line in the film where Leonardo Decaprio asks Kate Winslet if she knew what the meaning of insanity was. And then he goes on and explains to her that it meant that inability to love and relate to another human being. To tell you the truth, I have no idea where he got this definition from, because I know that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results.

Yesterday, I got a call from our client. He works as a translator, and apparently he has some very big contracts with blue-chip companies. The way he works is , he locks himself in his bedroom in front of his computer, hardly eats, doesn’t speak to his wife and just works constantly until the project is finished. He somehow manages to finish his projects in time , just barely! but he has no life for himself or his family. His wife wants a divorce and he is very miserable. She is even relieved when he doesn’t get jobs at all, so this means she can have a few normal days for their family.

He was so frustrated and yet, did nothing about that at all. I have to admit his behaviour is nothing special at all. MOST of us behave like that. Just carry on with what we normally do and expect somehow that things will turn out differently. Become richer, famous, better looking, but then, if you don’t do anything about that, nothing will happen, sounds simple? of course! so why don’t most of us do something to make what you want to achieve achievable?

Let’s go back to our client here, last month he had a heart attack, I know it sounds extreme, but he really did! he was hovering over his desk as usual, and got very stressed to finish a big job for one of his clients. This client was actually threatening to leave him because he was unhappy with the speed of the job. He got so scared and intimidated so he works himself 3 days flat to get the job done when he started feeling acute chest pains. This is what made him change his mind. This was the trigger that made him want to change something. He called us for help, he decided the wanted major parts of his business to work on auto-pilot. He wanted the booking of orders, the billing and invoicing, the auto emails and work progress to be completely automated and simultaneously transported to the client. He wanted to free himself from hours and hours of work. He loves to translate that is his passion in life, but he didn’t want to deal with the job that comes with it.

This client is getting a completely tailor-made solution. He is not only buying an application. He is buying his life back.

Do we really need to reach the verge of death to change the way we do things? Here’s some food for thought.

I had lunch yesterday with some ex-colleagues friends of mine. As always it has been very nice meeting them, but every time I do, I become pensive and a bit angry.  I left the route of standard employment awhile ago, and every time I meet my friends, it throws me back to the corporate culture. These two friends of mine normally have about 30 minutes for lunch, before they need to get back to their cubicles or to another meeting. So they are always in a hurry. It is basically, sit down, order, eat quickly, pay and leave. It is not the relaxing lunch I want to have with them. But being an employee and working for someone else, makes you behave like that. You have no choice!

Now, I know most of my readers, have left the employee route and are either self employed, freelancers and small business owners. Well, congratulations to you all. But, some of them still have the same lunch routine as the employees’.  The paradox is, you wanted freedom from a work place and now that you are working for yourself, you still end up not having time to sit down and have a nice relaxing lunch.

With employees, their time is someone else’s money, so it is not a matter of finishing work, it is a matter of looking good in front of the boss. With freelancers or small business owners, their time is their money, so any time spent over lunch, is a waste of money. They always try to run after endless duties, sometimes they hardly eat, sleep, or relax. Time is money and it is burning a hole in their pockets. So you can take the free out of freelancer…it is anything but.

Some freelancers or people who work for themselves, give up and start polishing up their CVs again, rushing back to the employee route,truly believing that this is the better, safer option. They rush back to the big corporations with their heads down, trying to hide the fact that they ever wanted to break free. Telling everyone, how hard it was running a business and warning everyone else from ever attempting to.

I believe, and this is the message I want to leave you with today, in being free, working on YOUR business.  If you struggle to find the time to do it all, there are tools out there that can help you become successful. We at iQ Desk reveal to you the secret of automation. Yes, this word doesn’t belong to the big companies. YOU too can also automate your business.  You can also create more time for yourself, you can also ensure that you won’t need to go and dig out your old CV from somewhere. You are going to be proactive and own YOUR own business for life.

You probably know how hard it can be getting new clients and keeping a good relationship with them.  But sometimes you are much better off giving your clients to your worst competition, and this is why…

At the time I was setting up one of my businesses and already had existing clients from years before. I was very stretched , as I just had my first newborn baby boy and I was struggling to juggle between taking care of the clients I had, helping my wife with the baby,and setting up my new business. Needless to mention, I desperately needed more hours in the day and in the night. 

I spoke with my then exhausted wife and asked her for advice, and she, despite being  very tired and half asleep made sense as usual, and asked me to look into the things that rob me of my precious and so little time. That was good advice.  The next morning, I sat down and analysed my time. The cocnlusion was so so clear. There was one client, only one client that was literally robbing me of my time. This specific client was not an email type of client, which is perfectly fine, but each phone call took hours and on top of that, he kept changing his mind over and over again about what he wanted.  So, I spent hours on the phone and then hours making endless changes to what he had originally asked. It was not a one time thing, it was a pattern.

After finishing the job for this client ,I decided not to take a new one and cut the cord with him. I actually realised that this client  was LOSING  me money. I recommeded a competitor of mine to this client explaining that I was no longer taking any new jobs.

The beauty of this was not only did I get my time back, I also let a competitor of mine deal with him now.

Hi all,

As always we work hard to improve iQ Desk - The software and the website as well. That’s why we have updated the iQ Desk Product page and added much more information about iQ Desk software.

Soon we are going to update the demo page as well. We also upgraded our customer support so we try to help with problems quicker.

Much more to come!

I want to tell you about a client of ours, who was so frustrated one day that she nearly pulled her hair off! She manages a very profitable yet a small translation company and one day, she realised she was chasing endless admin chores and never getting to promote the company. Off she went to the most natural space, and googled with the following keywords: 1. Small business software. 2. small business automation. 3. Small business solutions…you get the drift of the search.

Basically, she was looking for a SMALL business software, but almost everything that showed in Google ads was big names…Oracle, IBM, SAP, ERP,Orbit. She kept looking and looking and got so confused she had to stop the search and go home.

When you are a small business owner or a freelancer, you naturally want something quick to fix your problems now. You have no time to waste on learning how to start working with SAP or what ERP is all about. Or, getting to terms with complicated words such as “integrated software collaboration tools”.

Do the big names add to your business the value you actually need? Do you pay a lot more just so you get a very complicated system, you don’t even use half of what it has to offer?

I can tell you from my experience, even huge companies and I mean  huge, are sometimes better off with a simple, easy to use application. In one of the places I used to work , we had a new change manager, he decided that the entire firm should start using one of the big softwares out there and that this will revolutionise the entire business, cut costs, reduce headcount and will basically work wonders.  We were all asked via email to embark on a rigorous training and pass an exam…

Up to that day, we worked on a very efficient, brand-less software that did a GREAT job, and I mean great. Never failed us, didn’t need weeks of training, it was very intuitive to use. We had no problems with it whatsoever. But yet, being on someone payroll you have to oblige.

We went on training via web-casts, training in classes, training in PDF formats, training from experienced colleagues. Training seemed to have landed upon our heads from just about everyone! We wasted so much time training on this software, that we could have finished our day to day work for the entire month.  Now, we indeed started working on it, we had to work through endless functions and endless errors! it seems too complicated to use and very heavy compared with what we actually needed to do. We slowly reverted to using the good old software without anyone knowing just because we wanted to finish our work in time and go home!

Now, you know what happens with big organisation once the money has already been spent? They have to justify the expense somehow, no one will admit to the mistake.  This very expensive software was just laying there on our desktops, totally neglected and ignored eventually.

You probably want to know what happened with this organisation. Only a year after I left this company ,It went bankrupted, completely belly-up. 

Bottom line is  all that glitters is not gold.

Hi readers,

Yesterday, I received an email asking me if I could spread the word on something I read.  Now, I don’t normally spread the word, but after reading this piece, I am gladly going to do so. As you probably know from reading my last posts, I don’t particularly like big corporations, and even less, the people who get so empowered by working in a corporation, that they confuse their own identity and think like a shareholder, not realising that they are merely the employees on a pay cheque and they can easily get a kick in their shareholder-think-alike butt. 

The piece is called The Coming Adwords War by Mike Reining who is a co-founder of MindValleyLabs. If you are not new to the internet business, you must have heard about them, they are two young guys who build a multi-million internet company from scratch, and if you wish to read more about them please go to www.mindvalleylabs.com. 

Now, my point was, in this piece of the Coming Adwords War, Mike was talking about the big corporations of the  of the internet. He gives specific tactics on how to fight the big boys on their place in Google. He is basically saying that small businesses are at immediate risk of getting completely wiped out if they don’t act  now and fast.

If you think of the London high street or any other high street in the western world, you will see the big brands have already pushed out the little businesses that used to proudly be there in the past. They came and ate them alive with their deep pockets and ruthlessness, offering nothing unique at all, just mass solutions to the masses. They’ve already WON the high streets.

The high street of the internet is Google of course, and the shops are Google’s sponsored links.  They are already dominated by the big brands, if you search for a book you will immediately see, Amazon, Waterstones, The big supermarket brands, they are there first.  Has what happened in our high streets  is happening before our very own eyes in the biggest high street in the world? of course it is..

We at iQ Desk, as the owners of a small company, are worried. We can’t bid as high as the other big brands and buy the best spots in Google. If we play in their play ground, will we eventually get eaten alive, however niche we are and however good the product we offer?

Shall all small businesses go and play elsewhere? Build our own search engine where the big brands are not allowed? Or only pledge to buy from the small ecommerce sites? ( This is what we try to do).

iQ Desk is not the only software for small businesses out there. A quick search on Google and you see a lot of companies offering different software with different features and different prices.

And prices vary between $150 to… the sky is the limit. So how do you know what to choose? One of S-Development’s client (the company that developed and run iQ Desk) told us this:

“I was looking for a software to run my business. Everyday when I came back home tired after a long day, I found myself sitting again searching the net for hours just trying to find a simple software that will help me run my business. Each search made me more depressed, I just could not find a software that could do what my business needed. Then, I had an idea to copy from my biggest competitor around the corner. I said to myself, that I would use what they use and this is how I found S-Development Ltd.”

Now, he told us that, even before we started developing iQ Desk. But we kept this in mind when we developed it. Our motto is to keep it simple. Other software sometimes offer you things that may sound like a good idea, but then, they are so complicated to use (and expensive) that you end up not using it.

Take Microsoft Word for example. Great piece of software no doubt. But how many people use all the features? How many use 50% of the features? Do you want to know the truth? 95% use only 5% of the features of Microsoft Word. But they still pay the full price don’t they? But if you only need Word to write a letter to the local council about a parking ticket you better use Google Docs. It is simple and FREE.

We kept the same idea with iQ Desk. We designed it with the features that you need only. We know it because we use it as well. And of top of that, if you really need more, you can give us a call and we will be happy to develop it for you. Now think about Microsoft Word again. You may sometimes need Word to do something that it can’t do, Can you call Microsoft and ask them do it for you. I don’t think so.

With iQ Desk you CAN.