If you’re going to traditional networking events – if you’re not passing out business cards you’re wasting your time – unless you have a really impressive pitch, amazing presence and a really easy to remember web address, no one is going to remember how to contact you the following day, never mind in a few weeks or months (I know I’ve certainly dug through my collection of business cards on a few occasions, knowing I met someone that provided a useful service in the past but whose contact details escaped me).

So we’ve established that you need a business card. Now, what to put on it? At a minimum, you want your name, title, address, email and phone. After that, space permitting, the sky is the limit – most people will include their company logo (although traditional businesses like solicitors and doctors usually don’t), their website address, maybe their blog address, their skype username, maybe their twitter address and depending on their audience – maybe one or more of the social networking site address (linkedin, facebook, and so on). For a business audience, linkedin is probably the most useful – but certainly if you’re audience is web 2.0 then you may want to consider one or more of the others. Remember, there is a fine line between too much info and too little. Personally I like a minimalist, uncluttered business card but each to their own.

Once you’ve figured out what to put on your card – the next step is to design your card. If you have the budget, of course you can get someone to design your card. Assuming you’re an SME startup, I’m not sure it’s the best use of your marketing budget. It’s hard to make a mess of designing a business card. For inspiration, take a look at some business cards you’ve received from others. There are a few standard patterns. If you don’t have any (cmon, get out there and get networking!) – Wikipedia’s page on business cards will give you some examples. Depending on who you use to print your card, they may also provide some basic design tools and templates which you can use. As with all things marketing, you can tweak this over time so don’t agonise over it too much.

The last question relating to design is what to put on the back of your card. Some people choose to leave this blank and there is nothing wrong with this. Others put an image (maybe a bigger version of their logo) and either their company tagline or the website url again. Of course the sky is the limit here and you can do all sorts of unique and visually striking things with your card. The problem with some of these is that they will dramatically increase your costs. So if you’re in the business of graphic design, it may make sense to spend here, otherwise something less expensive is probably the right choice. For Atlantic Linux, I decided to put a QR Code (a type of two-dimensional bar code that some mobile phones can read) including the company website URL on the back – it’s a little bit different and compliments our overall technology theme.

As an company that works extensively with open source software – where it makes business sense I prefer to use open source tools. Designing our business cards was no exception. We use the Scribus Open Source Desktop Publishing tool to create our cards. It is extremely powerful and allows fine-grained layout of our cards. It also allows us to export the final business card in a wide range of different formats suitable for consumption by whatever company you decide to use to print your cards. As with any software tool, there is a learning curve but overall I found Scribus to be reasonably intuitive and very powerful. A new release (1.3.5) is available now so it is a good time to check it out. You can of course use a graphics package or a word processor (such as OpenOffice) and they will work fine – but subsequently editing the design or moving items around may prove more difficult (word processors aren’t really designed for fine-grained layout of various elements).

So you have your card designed and developed and you’re ready to print it. In Ireland at least, this is more expensive than it should be especially for low volumes of cards. You can go to a traditional printers but they’re normally geared up to printing a few hundred or thousand cards in a run and price accordingly. If you have a need for that many cards and shop around for a few quotes you’ll get an ok price. The problem is, for a small business, unless you’re doing lots and lots of networking, you probably won’t use a few thousand cards in a year or two. In practice, you’ll want to change your card before then – either because you’re business has changed in some way (maybe moved to bigger offices!) or because you want to modify your design in some way.

I took to the Internet to see if there were any alternatives. I was looking for a company that would be willing to produce lower volumes of cards, accepting that the costs per card would be higher (we’re not talking hundreds of euros here but if you’re a startup, you should be aggressively focusing on all costs). I found two suitable companies, Smileprint and Moo.com. After looking at both sites, I eventually decided to go with Moo.com – they provide more options for the kind of card and layout you want and work out cheaper on smaller volumes of cards (I decided to only go with a very small amount of cards so I have the option of changing them more frequently).

The end result –

business card (front)

and

business card (back)

One other thing to note – for printing purposes, make sure you use a large DPI when you are creating your business card files, DTP packages usually offer better control of this than word processors (whose output is normally intended for screens, not printers). Also, printers usually prefer documents that use a CMYK colour model rather than RGB.  I might revisit these in a future posting if there is interest (although Google should turn up lots of info on these and your chosen printer will probably provide specific guidelines also).

I’ll get back to the business cards in a later post including some recommendations for who to use to print a small volume of nicely finished cards and what you should put on the cards.

I guess for a technology company (large or small), I figure your first step in marketing should be putting together a website for your business, possibly accompanied by a blog (if you have the time and energy to write regularly and you have something useful to say). At a minimum, your website should answer the following questions,

• Who
• What
• Why

The who involves telling the customer a little about you, your background as well as providing the obvious such as contact details (email, phone and physical address) and maybe some details on what your company’s mission is.

The what involves telling the customer what you actually do. When you start on this, if you’re a techie, you’ll enter a brief fugue state where you start spewing technical terms and concepts that only other level 7 nerds will understand (hey it’s ok, I’m one too, I understand). Once you get over this, step back, and translate these terms into plain english that a (non-technical) customer can understand (so, while Atlantic Linux can deploy a large-scale event management framework utilising SNMP, IPMI and active and passive agents to quantify the availability of your enterprise infrastructure – in plain english we do remote system monitoring or even Linux systems support).

The why is the little bit about why customers should be talking to you instead of the company down the road for the services they require. This is similar to what you do but more about the customer than you. It can be summed up in three words,

Benefits, not features

So, rather than telling the customer about your 20 years of experience with Linux, tell them about how that 20 years of experience means that you’ve seen all the things that can go wrong in their systems and you know how to fix them. Rather than talking about how you’ve used 15 different Linux distributions on 10 different types of computer, tell the customer about how you have enough knowledge of Linux distributions to know which one will suit their needs (obviously, if you’re a software developer or a Windows consultant then you might want to talk about software development or Windows rather than Linux but you get the idea).

Putting a good website together is a long, painstaking process and will involve frequent rewrites and pruning (I reckon it’s a good sign if you find yourself taking stuff out rather than putting stuff in). We’re still working on our one but I think we’re getting close now (for the last year or so :).

The author makes a good point that what some people chose to view as a disadvantage of open source based systems – that you can choose many different components for an open source system and that you can configure them in a myriad of ways – is, for at least some environments, very much an advantage. I tend to agree. While I like to create homogenous, documented environments for my customers – I do tailor each of those environments to my customers’ requirements – rather than trying to change their processes and workflows to suit the software (an all too common problem which occurs when deploying entirely proprietary systems).

Our core mission continues to be helping businesses reduce their overall business costs while improving the effectiveness of their IT infrastructure with smart use of Linux and other open source software technologies.

• The certificate of incorporation for your company (some banks seem to require an original, some seem happy with a photocopy)
• The memorandum and articles of association of the company (a certified copy seems ok)
• For at least 2 directors, proof of id e.g. a drivers license and a copy of a recent utility bill for each of those 2 directors.

Finally, you’ll need to complete an application form when you go to the bank.

After some quick research on the internet to find the most local branches of our desired banks, we checked their opening times. This was our first surprise, most banks seem to only open at 10:00am. Or 10:30am for some banks on some days of the week. 10:30am? Since when did banks start working half days (they close again from 1:00pm to 2:00pm and again at 4:00pm, it’s like they don’t want our business).

First to our local Ulsterbank branch, one of the early risers, opening their doors at 10:00am. Clearly these guys want our money! Why Ulsterbank you might ask? No strong reason – their branch is nearby and I’d like us to put some of our eggs in non-Irish banks just to have a good mix (Ulsterbank is owned by Royal Bank of Scotland). The only downside to dealing with a non-Irish bank at the moment is that they only guarantee your deposits up to a maximum of €100,000 as per the Irish government’s recent announcement rather than yesterdays Irish government announcement which only covers Irish banks. In we go and ask to speak to someone about opening a deposit account for our limited company. We’re quickly introduced to a business banking person who takes us into his office, quickly explains our options and then proceeds to take the necessary documentation from us and copy it while we complete a nice minimal set of paperwork which asks us for sensible details about our company, the directors, what kind of account we require and so on. All told, I think it took as 15 minutes. The staff member thanked us at the end of the process and told us our account should be open by tomorrow morning.

Not bad, I thought to myself – clearly they value their customers and are interested in doing business with them.

Since we were on a roll, and we had all the documentation pulled together – we decided to also open an account with an Irish bank due to their recent success in obtaining the full backing of the Irish government (I’d have to start a whole new blog to discuss the wisdom of this, other than to wonder what troubled businesses will next be backed by the government … builders? Oh wait, they’ve committed to doing that already). The banks given unlimited coverage in yesterdays move by the Irish government include,

• Allied Irish Bank
• Bank of Ireland
• Anglo Irish Bank
• Irish Life and Permanent
• Irish Nationwide Building Society
• Educational Building Society

After a long strategic discussion (we checked which one had a branch closest to us) we opted to open our second account with Allied Irish Bank. They’re big, they’re guaranteed by the Irish government and they have lots of branches (and staff, I think I read somewhere before that AIB are by far the largest banking employer in Ireland).

So off we went to their local branch, wondering whether AIB would be even more efficient or whether they’d greet us with the smugness of a bank who’s just been given a large unsigned cheque by the Irish government. Opening their doors at 10:30am on Wednesday, AIB are one of the late risers of the Irish banking scene. We entered the branch, approached the customer service desk and explained that we wished to open a deposit account for a limited company.

“Do you want to do this today?” we were asked.

I wanted to open the account in the next 10 minutes if at all possible but I kept it to a simple “yes” to avoid any confusion.

After clarifying that we had all the required documentation, we were issued with a large lengthy application form to be completed in full (her emphasis, not mine).

I handed over our documentation to be copied – the same documentation that had sufficed not a half hour earlier at Ulsterbank.

“This certificate of incorporation is a copy, we need the original”.

“Why?” I asked.

“We just do”

As luck would have it, we had come prepared and had our pristine original. We handed it over to be reviewed and watch in horror as the AIB staff member proceeded to start stamping everything with a magic AIB stamp, including our original certificate of incorporation. This is a valuable legal document and there was AIB happily stamping it. I pulled my hands back from the counter, fearing where the stamping frenzy would stop and then demanded back our certificate of incorporation (my colleague wasn’t quite so polite and expressed his confusion as to why AIB had defaced our property).

“It has to be stamped” we were informed.

Anyone else that we have to present our certificate of incorporation to will be very impressed that AIB have stamped it – it harkens back to the days of bank managers being trusted … oh wait, they’re still elevated to such a position by the government.

After safely securing the return of our other documentation, our other identification was demanded. After getting the AIB staff member to promise not to stamp our drivers licenses (maybe the Gardai let your drive faster if you’re license has been stamped by AIB?) we handed them over to be copied and went to complete the form.

The first thing that struck me about the form was how much more detail we had to supply. The second thing that struck me is that the form had been designed to look pretty rather than be easy to complete.

I think we’d already spent more time with AIB at this stage than Ulsterbank had consumed, but we felt we must be there and must be within minutes .. or at least 24 hours of having an AIB account. We returned the completed application and received back our forms of identification.

“That should be up in about a week” we were told, in a tone of a voice that suggested we were lucky to be the recipients of such efficient service.

“What?” I asked, “we just opened an account with another bank and were told it would be up and running tomorrow morning”.

“Well, we have to run security checks on your identification and your company”.

“But a week …. ?” I asked?.

The staff member was having none of it. It takes a week to open an account with AIB and thats the end of the matter. Clearly if we didn’t like that state of affairs, we could take our business elsewhere. It’s not like AIB is stuck for cash – oh wait, all of the banks are stuck for cash at the minute, wouldn’t they be glad of your business? So, the Irish government can introduce a new piece of legislation for banks in about 24 hours while it takes one of those banks 7 days to create an account, into which we’ll be putting our cash.

I’ll let you know if we fail the security checks – but it’s clear to me now why at least one Irish bank needed to have the kind of guarantees that the Irish government has offered. They’re not getting business in the door because of how they treat their customers.

Despite all this, I’ve been considering moving to a hosted setup for a number of reasons,

• Incoming spam, in particular, is a big consumer of the overall capacity of our office DSL line. It makes me wonder if it wouldn’t make more sense to let an ISP who is geared up to handle this kind of junk filter out most of it for us. This gives us more bandwidth to use productively.
• We’re due to move offices in the next couple of months. Normally, I’d handle this over a weekend and have the infrastructure back up in the new location by the next business day, but it does involve working antisocial hours and you are dependent on all of your service providers having everything set up properly beforehand. I figure if we have the critical stuff hosted, we don’t need to worry about any upheaval during a move.
• As a Linux consulting and support company, it’s important for us to eat our own dog food when it comes to our software and services – we’ve been doing that with these pieces of Linux infrastructure for quite a while now and have learned a lot. But the time we spend managing those can now be spent on newer services and software, if we offload these services to someone else.
• Finally, I’m curious to see how well the big guys handle these services – it’s been a few years since I’ve used any hosting companies.

Never one to rush into anything, I figured we’d start by migrating one of our domains and see how it goes from there. I keep an eye on Blacknight Solutions – they’re an Irish ISP and give good support to various Linux and open source events around Ireland. Also, their MD writes a good blog and he seems to be a Stargate Atlantis fan so they have to be a good company to work with (I suspect I won’t be getting an honorary MBA from anyone for that kind of strategic reasoning – but I’m a firm believer in trusting your gut instincts on these things). Michele recently blogged about their new hosting plans and as it happened, the time is right for us to try one out. I purchased their Minimus hosting package during the week with a view to initially migrating our atlanticlinux.ie domain over to it. If that goes well, I’ll migrate the rest over the next few weeks.

My first impressions of Blacknight’s hosting platform is very impressive – they have a very intuitive web interface that lets you configure pretty much everything without resorting to their support. Not only can you configure the usual web and email – but they have included a lovely application installer which lets you install everything from blogging software to shopping cart software.

I did some testing earlier in the week and ironed out a few migration kinks (the main one being that our existing wordpress blogging system needed a PHP timeout to be extended before I could successfully export my existing blog postings from it) and bit the bullet this evening to do the migration. From start to finish, the entire process took about an hour – and most of that was time spent testing and tweaking one or 2 small problems. Granted, the atlanticlinux.ie website, email system and blog are pretty basic and don’t contain a lot of users – but my god, it really couldn’t have been much simpler. Well done Blacknight!

The icing on the cake for me was the wordpress migration – it took all of 10 minutes to

• Install wordpress on the new site via the Blacknight control panel.
• Export the wordpress blog data from our existing office wordpress installation.
• Import the wordpress blog data to our new hosted wordpress installation.
• And start posting new blog entries like this one.

I’ve done a few wordpress installs in the past and it is a pretty straightforward app to install, but the Blacknight system really does take any issues out.

I’m not generally one to endorse products or services on our blog – but I feel good services and products should be recognised and so far Blacknight have shone in their delivery – both in the product they have and the support they have offered. In my initial testing of their services, I must have logged about 20 support tickets – most of them were answered within minutes and all of the responses I received were intelligent and helpful.

I’ll be the first  to publicly complain if I receive a poor service in the future but so far I’ve been amazed with the quality of service I’ve received, especially considering the price, and no, I’m not receiving any favours to endorse the service. I’m just really impressed with it so far.

Thanks Blacknight.

So what do employers look for in CVs? I’m afraid there is no magic formula for ensuring you get a job with your CV. You’re only going to get called for an interview if the content of your CV seems to meet the requirements for the job. Some employers may use some sort of scoring mechanism to determine this, while others may use some sort of fuzzy Do they fit the job? type criteria. Either way, here’s tip no 1.

Give the reviewer enough information to determine if you meet the requirements.

Seriously. If you’re applying for a programming job, tell me about your programming skills. If you’re a student, I know you don’ have 10 years of industry experience – but hopefully you’ve spent some productive time sitting in front of computers, doing assignments and thinking a little about software development. Make this clear on your CV – from giving me some details about what projects you’ve written to including some information about what operating systems you’ve used. If you tell me you use Linux and leave it at that, I’m going to decide you didn’t know what distribution you were using.

Ok, so you’ve got 5 pages of a CV detailing your experience with programming languages. If you find yourself in this situation, well done! You’ve overcome the first hurdle and you’ve told us about yourself. Now the bad news, you’ve got to have some consideration for the reviewer. He or she probably doesn’t have the time to read 10 to 20 submissions each running to 5 pages. So here’s tip no. 2.

Your CV should be no more than 3 pages, and ideally 2.

It’s hard to delete stuff from a CV. You spent a lot of time pulling all this information together, and you’re really proud of that summer job you had 6 years ago, but trust me, it won’t lose you the programming job. Hopefully you’ve had enough relevant experiences in the meantime to let that go. This brings us to tip no. 3.

Customise your CV to the position you’re applying for.

This is a side-effect of tip no. 2. If you had 10 pages, you could clearly list all of your experiences and skills in a myriad of areas. But you don’t. So when you’re applying for a programming job, I want to mostly hear about your past experiences as a programmer. If you’re applying for a system administration job, tell me about your experiences as a system administrator. By all means, mention you that spent your time 50/50 as a programmer/administrator – but then give me the details of whichever experience matters most.

Our final tip for today,

Don’t say anything on your CV that you can’t back up in an interview.

The worst thing you can do is give the interviewer the impression that you have skills that you don’t have. The guy or girl, in an interview, that can expand Java to 3 or 4 interesting projects including some interesting technologies and a discussion of things that went well and badly creates a much better impression than the person that says Enterprise Java Development on their CV, and subsequently has problems discussing basic Java topics.

There’s no magic formula – just some common-sense guidelines. So get your CV in to us – careers@aplpi.com and we can discuss the content at your interview