According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics’ data on small business survival, only 44% of small businesses are still going after 4 years – and it’s continually those with the most effective management teams (almost irrespective of how good the product is) that last the distance.

So what’s the big secret? Truth is, none of this stuff is rocket science… Having said that, a young, headstrong ‘entrepreneur’ manager with a vision from which he refuses to budge might relegate these ideas to the bottom of the priority list in favour of becoming a big name on the block, and fast.

The fact of the matter is that there is a clear-cut difference between entrepreneurship and small business management. As this eHow article on the subject explains, managing a small business is an inherently more administrative role (everything from growing the business to ensuring legal compliance), while entrepreneurship has much more to do with the conceptualisation stages of a product or service, with the much more glamorous end goal of innovating and turning a profit through the development of an idea.

For the wide-eyed entrepreneur to make the leap towards becoming a successful manager, a combination of the following approaches cannot be overestimated:

• Employee training - it’s a well-established fact that employee satisfaction and know-how is what drives a business forward. Employees coming into the business for the first time (especially from backgrounds in other industry spaces) will be ‘stabbing around in the dark’ for a while – how long that ‘while’ lasts is in the hands of the manager and the resources they’re willing to set aside to get their employees on track and in the right mindset.
• Effective cost management - especially in the early stages, it can’t be stressed enough just how key spending money wisely can be to the direction the business takes. A good manager with a sound financial head implements a cost reduction initiative to maximise the firm’s year-on-year profitability.
  As simple as this sounds, it includes a wide variety of factors (everything from use of company resources to bonus schemes – you’ve got to still keep your employees motivated!) and requires a keen eye for opportunities to spend less while gaining more. All this cost-cutting while keeping quality as high as possible and keeping customers satisfied… Not a skill to be taken for granted.
• Continued, meticulous planning - from the moment the idea is conceived, planning is an invaluable part of keeping the business going in its desired direction. A good manager will only commercialise a business idea once a full business plan or proposal has been finalised, and once specific goals have been set in place (in both the short and long terms).
• Being a market visionary - much like an animal’s newborn young, a small business is fragile. It can be affected by even the slightest change in market conditions and must take advantage of its greater flexibility than larger companies to make the appropriate shifts and adjustments to cater for these conditions.

  If a competitor is about to release something new, the small business must show exemplary awareness and speed of reaction in order to stay ahead – indeed, one of the advantages small businesses have over their larger counterparts is the ability to react much faster. A good small business manager will already know their market and competitive field inside-out, but will remain a keen student of this market throughout.

• Be the face of the company - at least at first, the company is only as good as you are. Developing personal relationships with clients rather than just fleeting exchanges is what keeps people interested in your offering – the customers your business gains as it grows are an invaluable source through their ability to spread the word about just how good you are. Small business managers should ensure a good balance between keeping existing relationships healthy and generating new ones.

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Data gleaned from a variety of workplace surveys has found that some seventy-five per cent of office workers would rather email or ‘social network’ a colleague than have a face-to-face conversation. Call me old-fashioned, but this isn’t just another transition from one communication method to the next (although there’s still nothing quite like receiving a hand-written letter from someone). This development signals an altogether far more alarming trend – with all this ‘social’, we’re (ironically) just not that sociable any more.

Maybe it’s a generational thing? After all, telling your 90-year-old grandmother you need to Skype her and screenshare some of your holiday snaps (which you’re also going to stick on Instagram and, if she wants, you’ll give her access to the Dropbox folder too) is not usually a good idea if you want to make yourself understood. On the flip side, however, the concept of sitting down over a cup of tea and slipping photos lovingly into a leather-bound album is now all but lost to history in favour of more ‘virtual’ means of communicating and sharing.

While the grandma-on-Skype example is a small tangent away from workplace collaboration, it’s easy to see how this type of behaviour is becoming so evident in every part of our everyday lives.

Freshbusinessthinking.com sees the arrival of the online collaboration era as being a totally positive experience for all concerned – storing all content in one place and allowing the collaboration surrounding that content to happen in the very same place so that external communication is minimised.

However, an article by Express.co.uk on the subject of workplace communication explains that not only have Skype and email become the default means of talking to each other, but people are also increasingly resorting to talking electronically as it gives them somewhere to hide.

A spokesperson from officebroker.com has backed this point up, stating that “many workers have become so comfortable sending emails, they have lost the ability to communicate as effectively in person and, as such, avoid doing so where possible”.

Being asked awkward questions or being cornered into taking on new tasks were two of the main reasons cited as to why many workers preferred to keep their distance from colleagues and clients, using email as a barrier to these issues.

Online collaboration and social networking may have appeared out of the idea of making us better connected and more efficient. While these goals have largely been achieved (a recent Manpower report claims that 97% of Executives see a more ‘social’ organisation as being a noticeably more productive one), maybe we’re sacrificing our ability to interact in person in favour of this alarming new default…

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But isn’t it pretty worrying that we’re all relying so heavily on email? Just think how much time is wasted by creating a document, sending it to some colleagues, them making their edits and sending them back (separately!), and you collating the whole lot into a coherent final piece… Horrible!

What’s more, Manpower’s 2012 report suggests that 20% of the entire EU workforce is now ‘mobile’ (spending more than 10 hours a week working away from their desks). Keep track of all my emails, phonecalls, documents and meetings on their respective platforms while at the same time trying to figure out where I need to be one day to the next? Nah thanks, not for me.

Collaboration tools go a small but significant step beyond email by providing a more organised, collaborative and ‘portable’ way of working in teams. By centralising all your team’s content onto one ‘dashboard’, it’s so much easier to access everything that’s important to you no matter where you are. Just by having a central (preferably cloud-based) collaboration repository where everything can be accessed on the move, teams can shave hours off their working weeks by giving all the relevant people immediate access to what they need. Here’s how it works:

1. Get creative together – as Clay Shirky points out in ‘Here Comes Everybody’, the wiki (from the Hawaiian for ‘quick’) was designed to cut out all the editorial red tape and let everyone contribute to work-in-progress documents. Forget emailing stuff back and forth to each other – by creating it together, you’ve already saved all that time lost to admin and making manual changes yourself.

2. Talk about files, on files – another little problem with emailing files back and forth is that you can’t track the changes. You’ve received your file back with its edits, but you’ve got to keep back-checking the email to find out what the feedback was. Rather than having endless applications open and clogging your desktop, go lean and do it all from a collaboration platform where comments and feedback are seen right below the file in question, just where you need them.

3. Sync your diaries – collaboration tools give you a central space to sort out events, too. No need to create an iCal and manually invite people separately – making group events means your team can see and attend your events right from their own dashboards. Oh, and they normally sync with offline calendars too.

There’s no need to move away from email completely – that would, for most teams, be a huge upheaval in itself. Notifications can still go to your email accounts while all the important stuff is managed from a collaboration hub – teams and companies who have already realised this have shaved nearly a staggering 20% off the amount of time lost to low-value admin by centralising everything and making the whole lot more mobile-friendly. Email is a 40-year-old technology – isn’t it time we phased it out in favour of the industry that’s predicted to be worth $6.4bn by 2016?

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Here’s a summary of, well, everything:

- Improvements to clarity and ease-of-use of UI
- Improvements to font clarity
- More seamless switching from page to page
- Easier to navigate content landing pages (everything from Pages to Tasks)
- Bigger, more colourful navigation buttons (and who wouldn’t want those?!)

Go to your account today and check out how we’ve just made the most powerful cloud-based collaboration hub even simpler and more pleasant to use.

Enjoy!

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We have just made some key changes to our Free package offering, primarily affecting permitted user numbers and storage space. Previously, a maximum of 5 people could collaborate within 1 private group, and share 100MB per person. Now, we’ve beefed up our Free package option significantly:

- Unlimited members in your Private groups: Share content and collaborate with any team member or external resources without worrying about member quotas.

- 2GB storage space: Each member can upload 2GB of content of any file formats. Standard file formats (such as MS Office documents, PDFs and 95% of video formats) can be instantly viewed without prior downloading.

- 3 Private groups: Now it’s easier than ever to collaborate with relevant stakeholders within dedicated project groups. Every person can create 3 Private groups on his/her own.

Why is Clinked enhancing its Free Package offering?

Valid question. After all, Clinked.com already offers a variety of different paid packages to suit every organisation from the small team to the large corporate, with collaboration ranging from team-based internal interactions all the way up to the multi-client, multi-national organisation. Similarily, large competitors in the online collaboration market charge up to £30/month (per user) for similar features.

As Clinked.com CEO and Founder, Tayfun Bilsel, explains, “People and organisations are becoming increasingly reliant on larger, more dispersed networks to become more streamlined and increase working efficiency. While people previously relied heavily on email and traditional ‘strictly filesharing’ tools to help achieve this, they have now realised that this method locked key information in small pockets, often out of reach of the people that most needed it. Clinked.com is, by definition, a social collaboration tool for teams and enterprises, meaning that users everywhere are connected on the one platform, creating a place where content can be created and shared by anyone with relevant permissions. Using cloud technologies to achieve this means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can contribute as if the whole team were in the same place. They have access to exactly what they need – nothing more, nothing less. We’ve got clients ranging from a small Cambridge-based archtecture firm to one of the world’s leading global law firms on our books, and they’re all harnessing Clinked for the same exciting purpose – time and cost savings and productivity increases through cloud-based collaboration”.

With Clinked.com’s unlimited free offering, non-paying users can view or download files and comment in-line on documents, files, tasks and discussions. The fact that this can now be achieved at no cost to the firm means that new users can be integrated into paid accounts at absolutely no extra charge, further empowering everyone who needs to collaborate in any team. If you look beyond this and factor in the dedicated email and telephone support (in 10 languages), impressive uptime guarantees and upcoming full iOS and Android mobile App capabilities, all for absolutely free, the benefits of using Clinked.com become all the more obvious.

Sign up to the Clinked Free package and bring the ultimate in free social collaboration for businesses to your team. No time limit – try us for as long as you want… or contact us if you want to discuss your specific requirements.

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That’s pretty much innovation, in a nutshell, right? He who innovates, wins. And for all the disadvantages that start-ups can face, their ability to innovate quickly and efficiently gives a great big silver lining to that cloud. Here’s how it works:

1. Everyone’s connected, personally

In larger corporations, hierarchies dictate; in start-ups, one of the beauties about the working environment is (ironically) how blurred everyone’s employment boundaries are. Put quite simply, in a big corporate, a marketing intern is a marketing intern. What’s more, there are places to hide… In a dynamic new start-up of only 7 engaged and excited people who live and breathe their product, any suggestion counts – an idea from the just-started sales summer placement candidate goes right to the CEO and the rest of the company because, well, they’re all sitting opposite each other… Once a suggestion is made, it’s that much easier for a team to sit, meet, discuss an idea and implement it if it’s really innovative.

2. Your business world IS social

OK, so this one’s a bit of an extension of point number 1. The fact that you’re a small team working together on stuff, discussing every suggestion that comes to light, pointing each other in the right direction and generally manning the ship in an ‘all hands on deck’ kind of way means you’re ALL together, 5 days a week. There are many different approaches to playtime in the start-up environment, but these might typically include table football or table tennis (it certainly does in our case!), a shared lunch table, trips to the pub to celebrate big milestones, even group jogs. What all this means is that you’re so much more able to do things as a whole organisation, getting to know each other on a professional and personal level, so that all your firm’s product comes from a real sense of united effort. And it shows.

3. You’re market-driven by necessity

The fact that you’re trying to overcome barriers as you break into the market doesn’t have to be a bad thing, not at all. The ‘glass-half-full’ way of approaching this would be to realise that, because you’re new and fresh, you’re much more able to really listen to what the customer wants. Send out surveys, listen to recommendations or desires from prospects during pitches and meetings… A start-up can take this feedback and run with it immediately, implementing the changes that the market dictates within a very short space of time and without the red tape and sluggishness associated with getting suggestions to real decision-makers in larger organisations. There are so few degrees of separation in a start-up, so feedback picked up by a salesperson in a client meeting goes straight to those who need it back at the office. This becomes a true asset when potential customers realise that you genuinely care about, and respond to, the things they’d find useful in your product.

4. Organisational change isn’t quite the upheaval it could be…

Firms trying to innovate often do so by enacting company-wide organisational change to accompany the innovation. The clear problem with this comes when you look at adoption rates. In larger organisations, the CEO and other members of the management team may see themselves as great ambassadors for the change itself, thinking that their belief in the initiative will spread infectiously throughout the whole body of employees. Obviously, whenever these employees aren’t 100% compliant with change, it can’t work… The united, ‘group’ nature of start-ups mean they’re simply better equipped to deal with such change.

5. Lightning-fast, personal customer service

No automated machines, no complicated switchboards, no telephone queues with Beethoven’s umpteenth symphony playing twelve times on repeat – real people, real personalities. Providing priority customer support to your clients as a start-up not only allows you to deal with their queries personally, but also to establish a real working relationship with them. Beyond adding them to your professional networks, they’re more likely to come to you and your company in the future citing how well they’ve been treated – and they’ll mention your name in the process.

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This tool allows you to send direct messages to other members of your group. In this way, you can let them know when there’s something important they need to take a look at.

This new functionality allows you to type the username of anyone in your group, preceded by the @ key (alongside any content), which immediately notifies them that their attention is required. So for example, you might leave someone the following call to action below a page:

Hey, @johnsmith – I’ve just added the Q2 financial report to this page, please check it out and make any necessary edits! See how easily you can collaborate this way by watching our visual demonstration below:

As soon as you @mention someone in a post, that member receives a notification both on their main dashboard and via email, making it impossible to miss.

It’s the most effective way of letting someone know their contribution is needed.

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• Assign a due time to a task deadline. This means you can set a task to be completed on April 20 at 15.30, instead of just a due date without a time.
• Set task status. Define task status as either “Not started”, “In progress”, “Completed”, “Deferred” or “Waiting” for your team workers to see.
• Indicate task progress. Pull the progress bar to represent the % completion achieved, allowing your project team collaborators to quickly assess project progress.

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However, if you realise that file sharing per se is not equal to “efficient collaboration” – which is ultimately what we want, right? – things start look a bit different. Dropbox may eliminate the pain of sending large email files back and forth, but you still need to communicate with your stakeholders about the uploaded file and give a relevant context. Or maybe you receive feedback and questions, which you and others need to reply to…

But since you cannot integrate comments, feedback or approvals with files on Dropbox, you are most likely using email to sort out these questions (well, that’s my personal experience in any case). The problem is that when separating content from its related communications, it is harder to maintain control or keep everyone in the loop on new changes – it can easily become a mess!

“That’s why I use Clinked for my online collaboration”

With Clinked, your shared files or web page content are never separated from their related feedback, comments, questions – it’s all visible from a single view (see below). This makes your total overview much easier, and eliminates the need to maintain communications via email to discuss your shared files.

Just like Dropbox, Clinked is cloud-based making it extremely easy to provide user access to anyone internally or externally. All you need is a web browser, and you’re ready to go. True, there is an element of local file installation with Dropbox, to strengthen the file uploading and notification experience even more. With Clinked, we put more emphasis on creating a great collaboration platform, where content and communication are integrated.

A reminder of the Clinked collaboration tools:

• Create multiple groups for targeted communication & collaboration, with customizable branding & design
• File sharing storage, from 100 MB in our free accounts, up to 100GB and beyond.
• Wiki page platform, enabling you to quickly build web pages for use as Intranet/Extranet, or even public access
• Ability to comment on content (ie files & wiki pages), status updates, etc.
• Project management tools like:
• Tasks assignments
• Event calendar
• Member management
• Discussion boards

More features to make your Clinked collaboration more efficient:

• Decide what member or content you want to “Follow” – get notifications about everything or cherry pick yourself
• Powerful version control; easy to compare current and previous versions
• Tagging & tag cloud to simplify content search
• Upload files by email; very handy when receiving files via email which you want to share on Clinked
• Google Apps integration
• Single sign-on with Google accounts

In sum, Clinked goes beyond file sharing. We believe collaboration is most efficient when content and its ensuing communication are merged, whether it is file sharing collaboration or web page collaboration. That is what makes Clinked different from Dropbox.

Other tools are more similar to Clinked – but are often more comprehensive in terms of features (integration to Microsoft products eg) – this usually makes our competitors quite more expensive. Take a look at how much Clinked costs based on your requirements, and draw your own conclusions…

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We’ve just produced a short explanatory video to take our users through our ‘following’ tools. This aspect of Clinked allows all our users to stay up-to-date with all content they upload, edit, comment on, tag or choose to follow manually.

Never miss anything; stay ahead of the game!

Wishing you all a successful and productive 2012,

The Clinked Team

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