Business – Page 46 – Paper Street Enterprises

Tax Planning – Making Sure Uncle Sam gets his cut, and nothing more

A few days ago, I asked my accountant to make sure I was on track for my tax withholding for the 2012 year. To my surprise, i wasn’t 🙁
What I quickly discovered is that the better I do, the more I need to pay in (gotta love our system, penalized for working harder). The short story is that you need to be inconstant communication with your accountant. I made a big mistake in not communicating my changes to my accountant.

So, here’s what I recommend. First off, if you are a contractor, make sure that any time your rate changes, notify your accountant. My rate changed by $10/hr in Feb, and that threw off the calculations by quite a bit. To make things worse, I was also helping some clients remotely. All of this factors into a much higher tax payment. I always recommend working with your accountant because he can keep up to date if your tax bracket changes. For me, I hate have to come up with large sums of money in April, I try to pay my estimated taxes as I go. Even if you pay the whole bill in April (not sure if that’s allowed or not) you still need to be accruing money to pay that bill later.

Just as a side note, remember that in the US, the more successful you are, the more you are expected to be pay in taxes, and not just as a straight percentage. This is always a conflict in my heart. I strive to be successful and keep increasing my income in order to clear off all my debt and provide for my family’s future. However, I vehemently disagree with how the government chooses to spend my money, so my ultimate goal is to start checking out of the system. I want to pay off my debt, and build my homestead to be self sufficient, so that I can start to minimize the amount of money I pay in for taxes. If you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, I highly encourage it. (for those of you without the diligence to read a 1000 page book, there is also a movie version that gives the same info. ha ha). So, my rant is over…

Just remember, keep in close contact with your accountant. You don’t want a major surprises in the middle of the year (or in March).

Still learning the hard way…

“Who is John Gault?”

My Ideal Customer – More Marketing Stuff

Last week I started to talk about the unique selling proposition. That was step one of the marketing class that my friend Justin and I both undertook. The class is pretty good, but has some gaps, but that what you get when you sign up early and pay the bargain price =)

Well, step 2 (I’m a couple weeks behind on this, but luckily there are no tests) it to define who my idea customer is. In my head this sounds easy, my ideal customer is anyone that will pay me a lots of money for my applications (or even services, but I’m trying to move out that model if possible). However, after listening to the class, I learned there is a lot more to it. Every person you interact can connect with you on different levels. For example, I met my best friend James one night at a pick up game of flag football. We had an instant chemistry, and someone knew after that night we would be lifelong friends. Now I’ve met other people that when I initially met them, they drove me crazy, and hated to be in the same room with them. Then we eventually built some rapport, and started to find common ground, and some of those people are now friends of mine that I keep in close contact with. What I personally learned is that I often saw traits in other people that I hated about myself. Until I realized that I didn’t them, I actually hated that part of my own personality, I couldn’t bring myself to like them. Anyway, enough with the psychology lesson. What is important is to know what sort of people you want to deal with, probably on a long term basis. According to the class, you want to be able to visualize a single person that will be your customer. It helps to avoid trying to sell to everyone, the whole be all things to all people. We all know it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t stop us from trying. Since I need to keep blogging, I figured the best way would be for me to figure it out with you… my audience (that I really hope will eventually show up. ha ha)

My Ideal Customer is:
1. someone that knows what they need, and can articulate it to me.
2. someone that can express their needs without being blunt/as ass. (we all know the type)
3. someone that can afford what I’m selling
4. someone with vision for their organization. Someone that is constantly seeking improvement.
5. someone that understand their business. For example, for me, they should fully understand their Service business and it’s problems.
6. someone looking to build a long term relationship. I don’t want a 1 and done customer.
7. someone in their mid 30’s to early 40’s.
8. and entrepreneur.
9. someone with a small family and wants to be able to spend more time with time.
10. someone that reads self improvement books and listens to audio books.
11. someone that LOVES what they do.
12. someone that has seen multiple ways of doing business, not just a single company for their whole career.
13. someone very unassuming. Doesn’t live and die by name brands or status symbols.
14. someone that believes in the constitution of the US.
15. a gun owner, or at least pro 2nd amendment.
16. someone that takes pride in being prepared for possible disasters (corporate or personal)
17. someone unwilling to accept government handouts in exchange for government control.
18. a Green Bay Packer fan (couldn’t resist)
19. someone that understands that success comes from hard work, not just a good idea.
20. someone that roots for the underdog.
21. low maintenance. Won’t be pestering me daily with every little thing.
22. someone that can make a decision.
23. someone that takes care of their employees and wants to see them happy. (family too).
24. eats primal/paleo lifestyle.

The deal killers, or traits that I don’t want to deal with:
1. short sighted, doesn’t look at the long term picture.
2. Micro-managers. Needs to be a hands off type person that will give a destination, but will allow people to get there any way they choose.
3. someone that thinks the status quo is good enough.
4. someone that procrastinates and just won’t pull the trigger, even when they know exactly what they should do.
5. vegan

Finally, you have to name your avatar (and I don’t mean the blue guys in that movie)… So for me, my Avatar will be Alex. I know it’s bias, but for those of you that don’t know, I have the coolest little boy, just about to turn 2. So I can’t think of a name better than his =) He will be 6′ tall, athletic build, brown hair, blue eyes.

Think I have him in my mind…
now… who’s your ideal customer??? according to the class, we need this guy/girl for later lessons… so start picturing =)

WMIGO is ready for the next phase – MIGO + WM is a winning combination

For anyone that’s been reading, you’ll know that I started a tool that would allow you to do a material movement and create the transfer order in a single step. Well, I’m excited because last night, I put the finishing touches on that tool. I still need to do some full scale testing and create the documentation for it, but round one is done. It uses the idea of transaction MIGO and incorporates the WM pieces into it.

Some of the lessons I learned while building this, don’t clone transactions, and even be careful cloning screens. I ran into this when I began to set up the serial number entry screen. At first, I started by just copying the screen from MB1B. Nice and easy, right? not so much. I quickly came to the same realization as I did when I copied the MB1B transaction completely. It works, but it opens the door to a lot of potential headaches. So, like the main transaction, I looked at what was happening in MB1B, and took the important pieces. Now there may still be things that will need to be added into future releases. For example, at this time I’m not covering the user exits and enhancement points that the standard material movement have built into them. This may be a requirement for some of my future customers, and if so, at that time I’ll work on building those into my solution. IN the meantime, the functionality works, and I’ve created a pretty slick tool.

Finally, big thanks go out to Jeff Bass, without whom none of this would’ve been possible. Jeff is quite possibly the best WM teacher out there. Certainly the best I’ve ever met. I knew very little about WM before sitting down with Jeff for an hour. After that, I have a very solid grasp of how it works (and at least enough to set up a simple WM configuration). So thanks Jeff… couldn’t have done it without you…

as always, I keep learning the hard way so you don’t have to.

Unique Selling Proposition – USP

Today’s post is again, more on the business side, and not focused on SAP. I’m big on learning, and trying to make myself better. lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on sales and marketing, because that is where I’m the weakest. I recently joined up to a training called the Remarkable Marketing Blueprint. Sounds like exactly what I need. The basics behind this is that every week you get a some MP3 files, some pdf’s and the instructor helps give you the map to effective marketing. Like everything, you have to actually do it, if want the results. Week 1 had 2 focal points, the first I’m going to talk about today. It’s the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP for short. The concept behind it is very simple. Why should someone buy from me rather than someone else (or buy nothing at all). Since I’m in the midst of creating a new joint venture, it seemed like the right time to start solidifying this stuff. Afterall, it makes perfect sense. If I can’t verbalize why someone should buy our products, why would they bother to buy from me.

Now, I still haven’t come up with my final piece, but I have narrowed down a lot of reasons why my applications should be purchased. If anyone out there has some thoughts… or can even give me a different spin on this, please post a comment. I welcome an outside opinion.

Why is Paper Street Enterprises, and soon to be JaveLLin Solutions the place to buy SAP Add-in’s?
1. Industry experience. I’ve worked at or consulted to 12 different companies, all with their own flavor of service management (many also encompassing Variant Config, my other specialty). I believe my partner Mike is in the same ballpark on the PP side of the house.
2. Not only have we implemented the solutions, we design them. I have a special combination of skills that allows me to not only see the problem, but I can define it and solve it using ABAP.
3. We design the best of breed, or best practice solutions out of the box. No more painful design cycles. We give you the tools to improve your business today, not 3 months from now. Sure, you could hire a developer to do what we’ve done, but you also need to think through all the scenarios we’ve already factored into our tools. In addition, we can provide updates for any issues encountered by any of our clients… so your software purchased from us will mostly like cover any processes you have, if not, we can add it.
4. We are small and nimble. We can quickly react to the needs of our customers. If you need a solution that we don’t currently offer, and it looks like it could be a useful tool for other companies, we can quickly change directions and design.

These are really the big things that make us special. NOW… how do we work that down into a sentence or two? I’m still working through that… the good news is, we know why we’re special. We just need to get some customers to prove it…

As always, learning things the hard way, so you don’t have to.

Cloning a WordPress Website

Hello again, the past few days I’ve been working pretty hard on getting things setup for the new website. Being the CTO means that I should probably be able to handle little things like a website. If you’re been following me, “and judging by the attendance, you haven’t”, you’ll know that I recently had this site redone. I worked with a guy, Ben Fitts, that I would highly recommend. Well, I spent a bunch of money to launch that site, and My partner Mike said he also liked it, so why not use it again for JaveLLin Solutions. In my head, it sounded like a simple task. I’ll just take my paper street website, copy it over to JaveLLin, and rebrand it. I’ll give you time to time to stop laughing.

Well, as any good newbie would do, I went to the web and started searching. It wasn’t long before I found a several pieces of software offering to do this. I looked at the price tag, and it was $100. I only needed to do this one time, so I kept digging. I finally found someone that did the smart thing. They found out how to do it, added some screen shots, and then sold it for $15. I bought it. The instructions were good, and pictures clear, and it was as easy as 8 simple steps… “mostly”.

My first challenge was using a poor hosting site. For those of you looking for a hosting site, take my advice and avoid Fatcow. For a long time, they were good enough for me. But as soon as I started to up my game, I quickly discovered that all of the stuff they offer is out of date. I can’t updated to latest wordpress, or database, the blog platform was aweful, and the help desk was substandard. Short story, I’m cancelling my account there. Hostgator has been great and i would highly recommend using them. Reasonably priced, and great service.

Anyway, after playing with my site on Fatcow and not figuring out what I did wrong (this took about 2.5 days), I finally decided to make a new domain on my existing hostgator account. Almost instantly, the cloned site worked. However, since Ben set me up with a login and protected area to download files, I had to completely reconfigure that. Not rocket science, but it was time consuming. However, I’m excited, because the new site is up and running and seems to be great. One of my next challenges will be adding all the information for Proximity (our newest product). Adding pages is easy, but coming up with graphics that looks good… well, that will be a learning exerpience again…

Anyway, that’s why you have me… I learn things the hard way, so you don’t have to…

Cloning is bad… and I’m not talking about Sheep, SAP transaction cloning

Alright, well, I just learned something the hard way. For those of you that know me, you’ll know I’m good at that =). Anyway, a few days ago I talked about the new SM/WM integration product I was working on. I was all excited because I almost finished a replacement for the MB1A, B & C transactions to perform material movements and auto generate the transfer order. Well, I took a short cut. I copied the transaction MB1A, and did my updates to that. Well, I finished my development, got it all working in my 4.7 development system. So, as my usual process, I moved the code to my ERP 6.0 system. Well, I got instant syntax errors because things have changed a lot between those versions. Naively, I thought this old transaction will never change. SAP transaction cloning certainly bit me in the butt. It’s been around forever, so I can just copy it. WRONG!!! The code had a lot of enhancements (included enhancement points, changed forms, etc…). So… I’m back to the drawing board. I’m still going to generate the transaction, but now I need to build the entire front end.
Short story, there are no short cuts in solid developments. Anyway, I’ll keep you in the loop for my continued progress.
Thanks for Reading…

Starting a new Product – SM/WM

Like always, I just hate being bored, so I’m working on my next product that I think will take off. For those of your using SAP Service Management, you probably already know that Service Management and Warehouse Management have ZERO integration. Even though WM is fully integrated with production orders, which are very similar to service order, SAP neglected SM. Sometimes I think I picked the Red-Headed Step Child to specialize in… and as it’s turning out, it could be the best thing ever for me (as soon as my apps start getting into the market).
Well, this new tools is 2 phases. The first phase is create a universal WM helper tool. It will use the functionality of MB1A, MB1B, MB1C and add the ability to automatically create a Transfer Order from it. Simple, but according to my good friend and WM expert, Jeff, something many smaller companies would love. Especially if the same person who does the material movement also creates the TO. I’m nearly complete with this first phase.
Next up, will be integrate the SM orders the same way that production orders are integrated with WM. I don’t know if I’ve fully wrapped my head around how I’m going to accomplish this connection. I have 2 schools of thought and I’ll have to contemplate a little more before I start the coding. One option is to utilize user exits along with a custom configuration table. While this method can work, it is a little more intensive for a customer to implement. In order to avoid any possible overwriting, the customer would have to manually place this include into thier code. Not difficult, but not as easy as my other products. Option 2 entails a batch program that would need to run pretty often to pick up any demands released into the system from service orders and then generate the appropriate WM documents. I also need to spend more time understanding all of the pieces involved for production orders.
All fun stuff, and yet another learning experience. Special Thanks to my good friend Jeff Bass. without him, WM would just be another black box of SAP that I know nothing about. Jeff is an amazing teacher of this stuff. If you need WM help, check him out.
Thanks,
Mike

My 2nd Real Product – Service Dashboard

I’m pretty excited right now. A couple months ago, I completed Broadsword: SM Dashboard, an SAP Dashboard. I took my own advise this time around and designed something that some of my previous clients specifically asked for. It helps because I know the process so well, that I came up with all the scenarios I’ve seen throughout my career.
It’s pretty awesome because I was able to learn several new skills building this product (I’ll post more about those in some future posts) and more importantly, I actually have interested parties in this tool. Like everything else, I need a starting point, and once I have several clients running the tool effectively, that should open the door to future sales. Anyway, things are getting exciting, and between the new products I’m developing and joint venture with DMS I feel like my business is about to take off…

A Whole New Adventure – Joint Ventures

About 2 months ago, I did the SC Mud Run with a friend of mine that I consulted with. During the hour car ride, and then over dinner and drinks, we realized that we both were interested in launching products. My friend Mike also had a lot of ideas of things we could develop and sell to companies. Finally, I found a like minded soul. Since then, we’ve actually designed the first 2 pieces of Mike’s PP offering. The bad news, and it’s not really bad, but it is more work, is that now we’re looking to do a joint venture between the 2 of us. While this i awesome because I finally have someone to help with the workload, it brings about a whole new set of challenges.
1. We need to determine how to structure ourselves into a new entity. This may be a new LLC, it might be an operating agreement, or it might be both. While it sounds easy because I’ve already set up a business, it turns out because I already exist it’s a whole new set of challenges. I need to work closely with SAP to make sure that I don’t lose all of the development work I’ve done. Partnering with SAP is a great thing, but I’m being told I can’t transfer all of my development work to a new company. So I’m working through those details now.
2. For the first time, I need to work with someone else and listen to their ideas, and work together. Simple things like coming up with a company name, deciding where to incorporate, etc. Not bad, but I can’t just make a decision. We need to work together.
3. Determining revenue splits. It’s great because i have someone to share the costs with, but now I have to split the revenue as well.
And that’s just the things we know so far… I’m exciting for this new venture, but like every change, it’s always a bit scary. I’ll keep you posted as things progress.
Thanks,
Mike

Making Friends – How to connect with new business contacts

Today, I wanted to talk a little about making friends. Now this sounds simple, we learned this before we even started kindergarten, but in the business arena, it’s a little different. Not everyone wants to be your friend. It’s often a “what’s in it for me?” attitude.
I recently was lucky enough to talk to someone that has made it to where I’m trying to get to. His name is Sumit Sangha and he runs Security Weaver. They are a company that provides applications to SAP customers in the area of security. Needless to say, I was able to learn a lot from Sumit in a short amount of time. But I never would’ve met Sumit if it wasn’t for one of my consulting friends. He made the introduction because he knew I was trying to get my business off the ground and Sumit was a friend of his. I doubt I would’ve ever talked to Sumit if I wasn’t introduced to him by someone he knew and trusted.
The point of this is to remind you that everyone you know in your business life potentially knows someone with the next piece of information you need to go to the next level. So remember, promote yourself to your friends too. You never know when they might connect you to someone that can help.

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