It’s no secret that there’s an obesity epidemic in this country. In fact, in the past 30 years the number of obese individuals has tripled. And in a time when our nation is desperately trying to take control of the rising cost of healthcare, the obesity epidemic has already cost the US $150 million. And statistics show that obese children are much more likely to grow up to be obese adults. So it’s with open arms that the wellness community has welcomed the Let’s Move Campaign, the First Lady’s initiative to combat childhood obesity.

The Let’s Move Campaign Launched

The Let’s Move Campaign launched last month with these words from Michelle Obama, “The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.” 

Key Components of the Let’s Move Campaign

1.    Making Healthy Choices

2.    Healthier Food in Schools

3.    Access to Healthy Affordable Foods

4.    Increased Physical Education

Though broad in nature, the tenets of the campaign are right on target. So what does this mean for nutrition professionals, especially those focused on the health and wellness of children? Well, the folks over at The American Dietetics Association (ADA) applauded the First Lady’s campaign. According to registered dietitian and American Dietetic Association President Jessie M. Pavlinac, “Few if any issues matter more than the health of our nation’s children. The American Dietetic Association has long held that obesity is a complicated issue that requires the combined involvement of families, schools, government, communities and health professionals such as registered dietitians to address this national health crisis.”

Nutrition Starts in Schools

Nutrition in schools is one of the main tenets of the program and should be one of the top priorities for nutrition professionals. Kids spend a huge portion of their day at school, so it’s important for them to have healthy nutritional options from which to choose. For nutrition professionals, it starts by strengthening school nutrition programs. First off, we need The Child Nutrition and WIC Act of 2004 reauthorized. It expired on September 30, 2009, according to the School Nutrition Association, but the issue has been pushed to the back burner as a result of other legislative priorities, including healthcare reform and the war in Afghanistan.

Kids need to have more fresh produce available in the cafeteria with less fatty fried foods, processed meats, and snack foods. Soda and candy should not be an option for kids during the school day because it does nothing but promote highs and lows in kids that are already vulnerable to mood swings. Additionally, programs like Edible Schoolyard put kids in touch with the foods that they eat by allowing them to grow their own foods at school. School should be a place where kids have access to inexpensive healthy foods.

Encourage Involvement in Extracurricular Activities

Kids didn’t used to deal with such weight problems because they were much more active. When I was a child, I played outside until the sun went down or it was time for dinner. I watched television a few hours a week and had no interest in it otherwise. But times have changed. Television, video games, cell phones, and computers have all led to the growth of the couch potato and with it, obesity amongst kids. It’s important that kids are active and choose activities and sports that they find exciting rather than sitting at home watching television. Urge parents to limit television and overall electronic time. Have kids join a sports team, outdoors club, or dance class. The activity isn’t so important, what’s important is that kids are active.

Teach Kids Healthy Eating Habits at Home

Encourage kids to pack their own lunches so that they aren’t at the whim of the cafeteria for their nutrition, especially if their cafeteria lacks healthy choices. Choose whole foods instead of anything processed like local and organic fruits and vegetables, homemade trail mix, nuts, seeds, dried fruits, and sandwiches made with natural peanut butter and honey. The choices are limitless, but the key is to choose foods that are as minimally processed as possible so that the nutrition hasn’t been striped from the foods. Breakfast is also important, because it starts their metabolism off early in the day. Consider rolled oats with honey, natural peanut butter, fruits, and nuts or granola with yogurt and fruit. With so many delicious healthy choices out there, choosing junk becomes less and less appealing. But the key for nutrition professionals is educating kids so that they can make healthy choices on their own.

Since the advent of the telegraph in the early 19^th century, business and technology have been striving to bring everything closer together.

5 Tips for Avoiding Bad Business Advice Online

I’ve been looking into articles and blogs recently which feature advice for SMB’s who want to stand out in the crowd. There’s no shortage of free advice on the web, and I’ve been indulging. 

On a particular blog I read (How Your Small Business can Easily Stand Out) the author posed to the readers what he considers the biggest challenge for small businesses.

“How do I distinguish myself from my competitors”?

This is a good question, as SMB’s are frequently looking for the most attractive selling point for their product. The author, Dov Gordon, says that the answer is simple, and that there is “no shortage of people toiling to make it complicated”.

Ironically, after analyzing his line of reasoning, I conclude that he himself is complicating the issue.

I am going to quickly spell out his argument and show you its inconsistencies.

Premise 1: For your businesses to stand out, dedicate yourself to your customers.

Premise 2: A business that dedicates itself to its customers cares more about helping them than about making money.

Premise 3: A business that cares more will understand more.

Premise 4: A business that understands the customer’s world will think up ideas that will impact their world.

Premise 5: (missing)

—————————————————-

Conclusion: Your business stands out

This argument is fundamentally flawed for the following reason.

• The argument is invalid because Gordon fails to provide Premise 5, which links the rest of the argument to the conclusion.  His argument is missing this vital link.

Premise 5 should read: Thinking up ideas that impacts the customer’s world makes for your business to stand out.

At first you might think I’m being too harsh and nitpicky, but consider that perhaps the reason Gordon omitted Premise 5 is that it contradicts the first premise of his argument! Not only is this argument bad, but it’s confusing.

Like I said before, there’s no shortage of free advice on the web, but be careful, there is a lot of bad advice out there!

Here are some personal tips to help you make the most of the multitude of free business advice online.

TIP #1 – Good Advice for Someone Else Might be Bad for You

Every business has varied needs and capacities, and strategies that work great for one business won’t necessarily work great for yours.

TIP #2 – Always Consider the Source

This practice can save you from the snake oil salesmen’s wiles and save you time too. Always consider the website or company the author of an article is affiliated with. If the author links to a shady-looking site, they could be trying to scam you. Scammers will say anything they can to get you where they want!

TIP #3 – Don’t Believe Everything You Read

I’m sure many of us heard this adage as children, but it is good advice.  Never take anything you read (especially on the internet!) at face value. If an individual makes a claim without providing a source, be sure to do some research to make sure it isn’t unfounded information. Be wary, and be inquisitive.

TIP #4 – Good Advice is Free of Contradictions

If something labeled as “advice” is wrought with contradictions and you unknowingly accept it, you’re setting yourself up to be a confused individual. Good advice never contradicts itself. Keep an eye out.

TIP #5 – Good Advice Often Keeps Good Company

Once you’ve found a community, site, or blog that features good business advice, stick around. Intelligent people tend to draw close to like-minded individuals, so it’s likely there is more good advice to be found there, with less of the bad stuff.

Those are all the tips I’ve got for now, and I hope you can put them to good use. And remember, don’t believe everything you read!

Have you thought about taking a deposit from your clients when they book an appointment? Are you seeing ‘no-shows’ and looking for ways to reduce it? Or do just want to feel more secure that the clients will show up at the scheduled time?  Requiring payments before confirming appointment may just be the right thing for you.

We have added this feature just a couple of days ago.  With this, now you can require your clients to put a deposit before they can confirm their appointment.  The appointment booking process remains as simple as it was earlier: select a service, a staff, a date, a time-slot, and confirm.  However, when you turn-on the pre-payment option, your client will be asked to make a deposit (via Paypal or credit cards, if you have enabled them).  If they fail to make the deposit, the appointment will be saved in a pending state, so that you can contact them directly and follow-up.

You can also decide the pre-payment amount; it could either be a fixed amount or a percentage of service fee.  A successful payment will automatically be recorded in client’s account.  To enable this feature, go to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Appointment Preferences’.

As always, we believe you’ll find this useful.  Feel free to drop us a note if you have any suggestion.

According to the most recent AP-GfK poll, 78% of Americans report being happy.

Not to be cynical, but I find this statistic surprising. In the capitalist system we’re in, I wouldn’t think Americans are so overwhelmingly happy in light of our economic downturn.

I often talk with university students who dread the prospect of graduating because they have heard how bleak the unemployment rate is. I see reports on the news about the soaring job losses. Thinking about it sometimes bums me out too. Regardless, most are happy anyway.

Being the happy campers we are, 56% of Americans report approving Barack Obama’s handling of his job as president. And good news for all of us, now small business owners might have more to be happy for.

President Barack Obama recently called on Congress to utilize the repaid $30 billion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program funds (Wall Street bailout money) into a new program to help banks provide small businesses with the finances they need.

While this new plan has potential to help small businesses, it will be up to the banks to follow through and lend. While Obama is optimistic about this fiscal handling, not everybody is.

In a recent CNNmoney piece, Steve Gordon, a small manufacturer from Florida, grilled Obama during a town hall meeting by saying,

“I appreciate the pledge of $30 billion to small businesses. But lending it to the banks to lend to us is not the answer,” Gordon told the president. “You lent directly to the automakers, you lent directly to the banks — why can’t the government make [loans] available directly to us?”

Gordon makes a great point, and expresses what the majority of small business owners feel. They don’t matter like the big boys that Congress helps out directly. While this program has the potential to help the growth of small businesses, I would like to see a more heartfelt effort from the President and Congress. After all, in 2008 there were 29.6 million small businesses in the USA, according to the Office of Advocacy. That’s huge.

With just over half of the U.S. population working for small businesses, I wonder what effect this policy will have on Obama’s rating in the polls.

With the current data showing that the majority of us have remained happy individuals, even amongst recession and imperfect legislation, I would venture to guess that we will remain so.

 I know I will, but only if my bank approves my next SMB loan.

Significant improvements in project billing in place now.  Well, we deployed these changes a few days ago. I just did not have a chance to write about them.

Let’s get straight to what these improvements mean and how you can use them.  First, now you can create projects with a fixed price  and bill your clients incrementally.  Simplifythis will track the invoiced amount and the remaining unbilled amount for these fixed price projects.  You can see the complete billing history for each of the projects -just select a project and click on ‘Summary’ to do so.

When you create a new project, you’ll notice 3 billing options: (i) Fixed price projects, (ii) Hourly billed projects, and (iii) Non-billable projects.  Select the billing option for the project.  For tracking purposes, we now have added a budget field for hourly projects also.  You can track the amount billed against the budget and see whether you would be able to stick to the budget or not.

I know  - it has been a long time since our last post in the ‘New Features’ category.  Not that we were twiddling our thumbs; we were busy updating the underlying architecture so that we can incorporate your feature requirements more easily.  In the process, we did release a key feature-ability to customize your SimplifyThis page, which may have gone unnoticed by many of you.

The re-architecture  effort is finally paying off.  We are happy to announce the first major feature : ability to keep notes on contacts.  In brief, this will allow you to:

• - Take multiple notes on a contact.  As usual, select the contact and click on ‘Add Notes’.  To view all notes for a contact, just click on view notes.
• - Make a note actionable.  This is good to remind your self of  particular task that you need to do for a contact.  While creating or editing a note, select ‘Actionable’  and due date.  Once the task is complete, you can easily mark it as complete.
• - If you do not wish to view a note again, you can delete it.  If you think you may need it later, you can also hide it.

I know we don’t have the capability to search on notes, or to alert you when an actionable note approaches its due date. Be rest assured, we are working on it and will make it available very soon.

The idea of notes came from Brian at Empire Computer Services.  We sounded it off with several other users and everyone felt that this would be very useful.

Well, the list of new features does not end here.  We have also refreshed the look and feel of client facing pages with a sprinkle of new design, and the capability to choose multiple color schemes.  In addition, we have simplified the appointment booking process as well.  I’ll be writing about these two features in more detail separately.

When it’s good, it can be really good.

The most rewarding customer interaction I’ve had was a week ago. I’ve been reaching out to new Simplifythis users personally (either by phone or through sincere e-mails). Usually I don’t receive a response, but one customer was thoughtful enough to give feedback.

The Simplifythis user told me about a usability issue he had with the software, specifically regarding dates on invoices. I told our developer, Sanjay. Within a couple minutes I was able to get back to the user and tell him we were going to be releasing a new version in the coming weeks, with that issue fixed.

And when it’s bad…

I just had a funny experience where I was the customer for an SAP training center. After months of calling and e-mailing with no response, I found I was mysteriously placed in an online training class. No credit card, no name, no information shared. How could this be?

I figured they’d catch their error and someone would finally get in touch with me. They did, and it wasn’t pretty:

…Our coordinator tried reaching you hell out of times on Mon and Tues and finally gave up as it just goes to your voice massage…

My eyes immediately went to the “hell.” I’m more thickheaded than most, so I didn’t take it personally and sent an e-mail with an explanation of what had happened. I wonder if he/she was frustrated, as this sentence alone has improper grammar and a spelling mistake. If the company had poised itself as a training facility with a certain candor to its messages, I wouldn’t have been so surprised.

The lesson I learned is that your reaction determines where a conversation or transaction is headed. Because I’ve been on both sides of the customer service “counter,” I kept my cool.  Unfortunately, this customer service rep didn’t.

 What’s your favorite customer-centric story with a positive outcome (i.e. you helped the customer successfully, or learned something from the experience)? Let us know!

$150.

That’s about how much my little sister collected in two hours from the neighborhood for her school band’s fundraiser. But this isn’t anything new. School fundraisers are about as American as apple pie…the very apple pies that schools sell at their fundraisers! In my band nerd days I sold such questionable items as:

• Engraved pens
• Cookie jars that doubled as piggy banks
• Wrapping paper
• Lollipops.

But my sister’s band sold something completely different. To find out what it was, tune in next time to our 41-part series on “1,438 Ways to Sell.”

(Just kidding)

My sister’s band sold: nothing. They went door-to-door with a manilla envelope asking for money to support the band that would march at a football game the neighbors may never even see. They didn’t provide a service, a good, or anything else business class says is necessary for a transaction to occur. And yet, a group of four high schoolers earned almost $75 an hour (in a recession!).

How? They made the neighbors feel good. Who wouldn’t feel nice giving five bucks to a sweet, adorable band nerd? Most of our businesses offer services and goods - a lot more than nothing. And it could be even more if we made our customers feel good.

So, how do you make your customers feel good?

We’re about to roll out a new level of retention efforts - specifically for our free trial customers. That means we’re letting people know we are here:

• For support, questions, comments, concerns, training, tips, conversations and anything to make your stay with Simplifythis a pleasant experience
  (so you can come back for more…)
• To learn from you so we can make Simplifythis better for future generations

If you are extending a free trial with your business, you might as well do a good job of welcoming your customers. Anyone can satisfy the first bullet’s requirements with a few helpful e-mails and a blog post. It’s the business-practice equivalent of, say, having a Web site. That’s the base-line that any growing smbiz should meet.

Institutionalizing the second bullet point is tough but if done, can show you where you need to focus to meet your customers’ expectations. If I sign-up for a free trial of a computer program I’ve never used, I expect to have my hand held at the beginning and (depending on the program) I expect to be able to let go after some time. Two basic requirements that the business many opportunities to help their customers.

Know what your customer will expect. Then use that knowledge to make something awesome (a la Bobby McFerrin, who took the expectations of his “customers” and…well, see for yourself).