I was trying to schedule user meetings for our POS software and came to calendarpedia.com website which had heaps of free calendars and planners for 2018 to 2021 in Word, Excel and PDF formats. I picked a few and reviewed them and finally selected one that suited my purposes.

Then I thought to myself that many of my readers who are like me often planning would find it useful too.

What you do is select a calendar that is the closest to the one you require, probably in Word/Excel and edit it to your requirements. If you do not have an office program to edit these calendars, check out this free one here.

These calendars are great to stick on a wall at work so that everyone can see them.

After so many years of being involved in SMB, I have seen many write a business plan. I have also seen many give up on writing one because the amount of work involved they felt was more than what they got out of it. However everyone I know who has done a business plan said that they got much out of it. I think it is not essential but its a good idea.

I warn you it will be a lot of work. You will be running back and forwards to your point of sale software to get figures, probably talking it over with many of your staff and others. In general the more you put into your business plan, the more you will get out.

In my experience, there are two major factors in people writing a business plan. The first is if some want to formulise their business, as they like to be super organised and the other if they are trying to get finance. In finance, it's great as someone who does not know your business can pick up your plan and see where you are at and where you want to go.

It is also an advantage internally as it makes everyone think on the same wavelength which is particularly important in retail as it is a service industry and unlike many other industries, the retail business really depends on many small facts like services, atmosphere, image, etc., For example, heaps of people can buy magazines in many different outlets, why do they come to me? Possibly I have a bigger range of magazines, maybe I give faster service, perhaps ...... ? Now how do you think this will be in the next few years?

If you decide to go ahead, the next question is decided if you want to do it yourself or get a consultant. As many people don't know the first thing about writing such a plan, some people use these consultants once and then as they figure out what these guys are trying to do, do it themselves. I would say you are looking at a consultant budget between $800 and $2,000 for a typical SMB business. The big advantage here is that they do have industry insights here that you do not, and their business experience will help you. As they write the plan, they review your thoughts. Plus finance people think more of their plans.

If you want to do it yourself, there are several good resources available to you from writing a business plan, for example, the Australian government has free business plans and guides [Links removed].

Generally many of the books, from what I have seen are way over the top, probably because they are really written with insights from large companies and organisations.

In all likelihood, the best solution is to use business planning software, if you are doing it yourself as it will guide you through each step of making a plan and do much of the work for you. You are probably looking at $100 to $300 although Enloop has a free service here which is very good. At the very least with this free version, you can test it out, and if it does not meet your needs, then at least you will have some experience and know more about what you do require.

Here are some really good points with using business planning software based on the cloud.

1) It is easy to change.

90% of it will be the same as time goes on but that 10% will change dramatically. With software, you can print it out now, close the book on last month, then examine what went different and store it away for future examination.

You can also edit your figures and see what effect it will have on your plan. For example, you might say: I am budgeting for $1 million-dollar turnover and $220,000 gross profit, then you might say if I drive the business and push it to $1.5 million so producing a $280,000 gross profit, what will be the effect?

2) As it works on the cloud, you can be anywhere and when you get the urge, you can work on it. This is not a small factor as you need to be updating your business plan continuously; whenever things change, monthly as you do monthly reports and yearly as you review and plan for the next year.

Probably the biggest disadvantage is that these software have standard plans so you do not have much flexibility if your business requires something different there will be problems.

Hope this is of help.

This is a tip if you are doing deliveries, something that today is becoming more and more important in retail, so I think you will find this app useful.

Voyager is available on the android. I am not sure about IOS.

What happens is when you get a list of delivery points, what you need to do is organise your route. To do this can take some time and much of the information like traffic and road repairs you probably will not know. That is why I like this app. with this app you enter your starting and ending position, and the delivery points into it. It then will optimise your trip to give you the fastest route accounting for the latest real-time traffic. Next, it links to Google Maps, so Google Maps can direct you.

This type of productivity software is used by large transportation companies for a long time but is only now available for SMB businesses. The maximum number of delivery spots is 100, but it may run very slow at that level. We normally run it at about 20 spots. One big advantage I find is that it gives me a timetable with travel times, so I have a good idea of how long the route will take to be done.

We find it saves us quite a lot of time.

Hope it helps you too.

PS If we get enough call for it, we will probably link it into our POS software.

A while ago, I showed how to use your point of sale system to help you find what the public are interested. The idea being to try to sell to them. Then what you do is grab a few items in the shop, put them together, hang a poster up and try to sell them while they are hot.

My current example was the Game of Thrones which is very much in the public eye now particularly after the recent muck up with foxtel which caused a storm in twitter.

As you can see from this graph the interest in this, is much higher than all footballs in Australia.

The problem some people said to me, was they could not get any appropriate posters. Which sort of surprised me.

Well here is a terrific site for making posters. The software is very easy to use. You can print them yourself or get them done at some photolab professionally if you want something better.

Here is a poster that a client created using it. I think it looks pretty good.

How many times have we heard the comment "We know what we are doing and its perfectly okay," just before it happens? I am sure of the people over a 1000 kilometres south of the cyclone in Northern New South Wales said that too before the floods came down.

Well, Cyclone Debbie has been an education. Just before the Cyclone hit, we rang up every client we had in Northern Queensland from Townsville to Rockhampton to make sure that they had an offsite backup. To our horror, we discovered that almost none of these sites had an emergency backup, and practically all of these people had no idea how to make such a backup. We had to talk them through it.

Then the floods started and the telephone cut out, and we could not warn people and of those, a few went down with no backup. One told me, he is a country newsagency, has over a $100,000 of debts and no records as to who owes what. The odds are that those that do owe them do not have much of a record either now.

How this for a heading "BUSINESS LOSS DUE TO NO BACKUP." There will be many such stories, I am sure.

There is any number of disasters that can happen with computers, flood, theft, fire, ransomware, etc. The only solution is to have a backup off-site.

This was totally unnecessary, as we have a cloud backup solution that is completely free for our clients.

Well we have been busy today because of the calls from Queensland and the flooding there. Every place has its own story.

What it does show is, that although we cannot sometimes avoid disasters, we can with careful planning minimise the damage.



The first point to do to prepare for a disaster is to make a plan now of how you will respond to a numbers of disaster threats for example floods, fire, theft, no electricity, etc. Your disaster recovery plan does not need to be overly complicated. What you want is something simple, useful and available.



Run though a few scenarios, say you do not have the Internet now what happens. With one client who had an offline backups stored overseas, we had to download their data in our office from one of these services and post it up to them.



Say you do not have electricity now what happens? Do you have a spare computer somewhere else you can use? Have you tested that it can do the job?



Above all in computers, do you have backups, backups and backups for your work, including your pos software. If yes, have you tested them?

One software company, I know well has recently released a statement that because they do not hold credit card numbers in their software that their clients have tranquillity about their customer credit card details and fraud. Well, it might get them off the hook if a potential court case starts, but it is certainly not the *whole* truth.

Firstly let's start off by saying that such data breaches are extremely serious as I wrote here of a study by Experian, showed that 60% of small to medium business closed down within six months after such a data breach. Much of this, I think must be because the banks, MasterCard and Visa looking into recovering their monies go for the retailer and then there are fines and legal costs too.

Now what is happening is a relatively new class of viruses called PoS RAM Scraper Malware has been created by hackers to specifically target retail shops and its huge. The reason why retail shops are simple, there is a lot of credit card details going through the POS system.

Here is a map of PunkeyPOS found by a well-known antivirus company in June this year. What it shows is the places where they found it.

You can read more details here on what they found here.

What can be done?
 

You may want to have a chat with your credit card provider however here are some tips, I would recommend.

1) Be careful where you and your staff go on the net. If you must go to these sites, use a computer that is not on your POS system.

2) Make sure you have a virus protector that is maintained. Let me warn you here that there is no best antivirus out there, they all have pluses and minuses. Note the window defender in windows 10, I think is very good and its free to all businesses.

3) Update your windows software with the latest patches.

4) A firewall would be good. I would recommend setting up your firewall on the machine that does EFTPOS to stop access to almost all the net. The other advantage to doing this is that your employees will surf less on your time. I think the free Windows firewall is good. Fairly easy to use. It passes all inbound tests (both stealth and open port) and does not have any popup alerts which can be a real pain. Also, it is not likely to conflict with your other programs. Plus most techs know it.

If all of this does not work at least you can have a good argument in court that you did try your best.

Monitoring your online reputation is big today.

Not surprising as it is estimated that having a bad online reputation can lose you 10% of your business conversely, the rewards of a good reputation are huge.

In a survey, I saw recently 89% of the public stated that they do check organisations and people online before doing business with them. For example, with me, before doing a major extension to my house, we checked the builder we were thinking of using online. Even for some minor purchases, I check online. Yesterday, as an illustration, we wanted to buy a pizza for lunch. As its Easter, we knew that the pizza café nearby that we liked was closed so I searched online to find ones that are close that were open. Then I read a few reviews before I selected the place before going. After eating the pizza, I added my review.

Now today with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media, good and bad reviews go out instantly. Not only that but it does not go away. An injurious review can live for many years against you, and you need a lot of good reviews to cover up a bad one.

So what you need to be is aware of what people currently are saying about you and your business online. Even if they are not legitimate, you need to address it and please do not imagine that all these reviewers do not have an agenda. For example, you will find some of your competitors, and we all have them in business that has an active agenda. For example, I have a competitor that constantly complaining that I am too cheap, I do give them credit for being inventive with their reasons to justify their higher prices, but if I do not address it, online readers will read these bad remarks and think they are truly the reason we are too cheaper is ....

However, most of your reviewers you will find are legit and remember that most of your dissatisfied customers (95%) will not complain, they just never show up again, so it is critical to engage the ones who do complain to determine what the issues are with your business, so hopefully, you can address it. In the worst case, you prove to your online readers, that you tried, that there is a second side to the story, and you did try to fix it.

So how do you know what people are saying about it? Well, the quickest and easiest way to do this is by doing what your clients do. Go to google, bing, Facebook and then Twitter in that order and do a search with your company name and see what pops up. If you have not done it, you will get a surprise to discover what people find when they search for you.

I do suggest you do this every quarter but the problem is, that it is not practical to do it every day or week. Now there are very sophisticated tools to do exactly that. However few of us can justify the expense.

So what I do suggest is that you set up a free Google Alert.

As Google is the main search engine in Australia, which has about 80% of the market so they are going to catch most of it. It allows you automatically to check your business, your products and your service. You will find it simple to set up and use. Once it is set up, you can forget about it. As Google discovers something new about you, Google will send you emails about it. Most people actually will set up a few google alerts. I suggest that you set it up to email you once a week.

TIP: What I do is I have a newsletter folder in my inbox, and I set up a rule which redirects my Google Alert emails and sends it to that folder, so when I feel like it, I can examine them. It also gives me a paper trail of what is happening online with me.

Google Alerts is an ethical way to stay on top of what is happening to you online in the news articles, blogs, videos, groups, etc. Besides your business reputation, it can also help you keep on top of what is happening in your industry, what others in your industry are doing and any topic that you think is relevant to you.

Click here for a video that explains how to set up Google Alerts.

A common problem many face is that because everyone in the business could get access to any computer in the systems, how do they keep their information confidential?

So what we do is set up our users with an encrypted disk drive. Anything on these encrypted disk drives until they supply the correct password is unreadable. Once they put in a password, it acts as a normal drive with its own letter, accessible like any other drive. When they finish and close the program, and it turns back into unreadable again to anyone without the password. Doing this is a big advantage too if their computer is lost or stolen, as no one can read their private information.

Until recently we used TrueCrypt to do this but for some reason, TrueCrypt shut down. No one quite knows why. So now we use the new VeraCrypt which we think is better.

Once VeraCrypt is set up it is so secure, that I doubt anyone in Australia could break it.

Just thought it timely now to remind everyone about the Education Tax Refund. If your clients have children in school which many of them do have, they may be able to buy items for school in your store and receive a 50% rebate on their tax form up to $750.

It really is a fantastic opportunity to sell your shop.