How to Prepare Yourself for CFP Exam

Certified Financial Planning is the most recognized, prestigious and internationally accepted degree course. Material for CFP exam is easy to verify on-line. Stay updated via E-services and download latest CFP course and list of best authors for certain subjects. Make the best approach to crack CFP exam as it is a tough nut to track yet hard work and proper knowledge could enable you to grab far better degree of CFP course.

Postgraduate Certificate of Financial Planning is a mystery, but it opens all doors of success and evaluation of their abilities. To request a certificate of CFP course is used in many approved course providers need to take care of some things before taking a responsible course. The list is a consideration in the selection process and raises the benefits associated with the certificate of CFP exam:

The title is written in an accredited university, is an “accredited university”, which was approved by the Ministry of Education accreditation accredited explained that the license, see the course schedule online subscriptions check, compare the cost of education, reviving the style of education and a careful analysis and comparison of all databases, select the most appropriate and continue to use the CFP course certification.

Instant credibility and respect of clients, employers and colleagues is available. Provides the same competitive advantage over other financial advisors impressive. A complete analysis of the skills and knowledge of complex financial planning. Belonging to a global network of professional trainers certified financial planner.All are united in a celestial facts certified financial planner to be.

Certified Financial Planner have different functions, including not only basic financial planning for the management of social security benefits, pensions, real estate and tax planning, insurance planning and risk planning. Everything strengthen opportunities for huge growth and big profits

Educate family physicians; you can take your career to great heights. The correct choice is the key to some ideas for assessment for selection and certification of their financial advisers to help education.

The benefits of a certified financial planner depends on many factors such as education, skills, certifications, customers, the stock market and other investment vehicles, experience and desire.

Anyone can sell insurance and annuities, stocks, bonds and mutual funds – but only a global financial planner can add value to their financial security through various tactics.

A better understanding of the origin of the CFP course, you can understand the logic and the importance of proceeding in this way. Enter all necessary information on-line access to different places and with many years of experience available 24 / 7 for the address.

The designation of Certified Financial Planner certification is important for financial planners, CFP exam is Board of Standards in the United States and recognized worldwide by other financial institutions associated with the planning of customized global business.

Prepare yourself for CFP exam with best developed technological tools to upgrade your knowledge status and acquire internationally known CFP course degree. Grab best possible material and keep in mind above points while preparation and make best efforts.

Ten Ways to Sweeten the Job Or Job Offer

One aspect of meaningful work is being compensated adequately for the work that you do. Whether you are currently in a practice having survived a lay off or negotiating for a new job, you are probably finding that raises are small or nonexistent and offers are lower than what you were used to. Even if you did not get all the money that you wanted, there are other perks that can be negotiated. 

 

Don’t give up what is critical to you but find other ways to make the job more attractive. Now may be the time you actually negotiate work/life balance into your job! A firm needs people who are happy, energetic and enthusiastic to develop the business and do the work. Here are 10 ideas to help you to negotiate a really great offer. 

 

1. Use your strengths. If the job description includes pieces that do not play to your strengths and you can see a way to show that the piece that you do want is important enough to be your primary responsibility, negotiate dropping the less attractive pieces. (You will need to show them that focusing on this piece is important to the company.)

 

2. New to the firm? Ask for an introduction from the firm leader or someone high enough up in the organization that can transmit power to you. This will make managing a team easier and will help you get the kinds of work you want.

 

3. Improve your performance through better resources. Ask for more people, more budget for your department/group, or other resources for you and your department/group to help you perform better, faster and more thoroughly.

 

4. Get customized hours for your situation. Ask for different hours than are normal for the organization. For example: Come in earlier and leave earlier. (This can help with work/life balance)

 

5. Increase the vacation time or get vacation when you need it. Ask for specific vacation dates (vacation during school vacations) or extra vacation time (4 weeks instead of 3). (This can help with work/life balance)

 

6. Set an objective that is important to the firm. Determine a time frame in which you could accomplish a key goal and ask for a bonus upon completion.

 

7. Telecommute from home full time or part time. Ask for the ability to telecommute a certain number of times during the week or month. (This can help with work/life balance)

 

8. Improve your skills. Think about becoming a “Thought Leader” or “Subject Matter Expert”. Look for possible training in skills where you want to develop expertise or ask for a tuition reimbursement plan if you want to pursue an advanced degree. Get the company to cover memberships to professional associations and subscriptions to professional and business magazines and newspapers.

 

9. Ask for a specific job title. If your firm puts value on a particular title, ask for that title.

 

10. If this is a new job for you, ask for a signing bonus. Add a signing bonus to a bonus on completion of the key goal may get you close to the salary you were asking for. Of course next year you’ll drop back to the salary but by then you can be looking for other ways to increase your salary.

Precision Market Timing – By The Numbers!

In the next 10 minutes, I’m going to reveal to you what took me over thirty years of intensive eyeball-to-chart research to discover! The road has been long and sometimes bumpy with plenty of unexpected twists and turns along the way. And, guess what…it hasn’t ended yet! The more I learn, the more I realize there’s more to learn. So, fasten your seatbelt and experience the excitement I felt on this road of discovery…it’s truly been a ride to remember!

Let’s start at the beginning. I made my first commodity trade in 1968 while a student at the University of Montana working towards a Master’s Degree in Business Finance and Investments. I was fascinated by the leverage you could get on your investment capital by putting up a relatively small margin fee in order to control a much larger quantity of some commodity…leaving open the potential for substantial gains…and by using stops supposedly limited risk. And, since I was a cash-strapped student with a “relatively” small amount to invest, this really appealed to me.

So, one memorable Tuesday afternoon, I skipped gym class and hiked downtown to open my first commodity trading account. I was nervous as a cat…but, I knew it was something I just had to do. The broker was understanding and after about an hour of filling out forms and waiting for an OK from headquarters, I plunked my money down and began what I imagined would be an illustrative career as a “professional” commodity trader. I just couldn’t wait to get started!

Early the next morning, I was chomping at the bit and decided to start off by trading corn futures. Then over the next two weeks, the worst thing that could happen to a beginning trader happened to me…I had three big winning trades in a row! I was convinced I was the King Kong of trading…and frankly couldn’t figure out why everyone told me trading was so hard to be successful at. Then, as you’ve probably guessed…the fourth trade murdered me. I lost everything I had already made plus $200 more than I even had in my account! So much for the supposedly limited risk. You can guess where the book fund for that quarter went! My trading “career” appeared over about as fast as air rushing out of a balloon.

I went away from that experience licking my wounds, but absolutely convinced there was an underlying and identifiable pattern or rhythm in the markets. I could sense it. I knew it was there…but, I had no idea what it was. I wrestled with questions of how such a thing could exist. Or more to the point, since I saw evidence of it’s actual existence…how could I prove it existed? Even though initially I even questioned my own perceptions, I just knew in my bones it was there! I was determined to do whatever it took to identify it, pick it apart and ultimately find out exactly what made it tick.

It was then I realized that if you could discover any sort of regular or consistent pattern in market movements…you would have the key to successful trading! Why? Because you then could trade in sync with the timing patterns controlling market movement. This was certainly a goal worth devoting a lifetime of research to…and, as it turns out…I have!

I started my search by going to the source…the markets themselves! I studied charts from every market I could get my hands on…some constructed from data going back to the start of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848! I knew that if there was a pattern that repeated itself in the markets, I could find it…given enough time, effort and stacks of charts to look at.

After night after night of painstaking study, a bit of inspiration arrived from somewhere and I came to the conclusion that by simply using daily futures charts…where each vertical bar represents a single trading day, I could possibly detect tradable patterns by identifying reversal points in normal ongoing markets…specifically, reversals that tended to occur on the same number counts over and over again when counting forward in time from any significant high or low point…in the past.

It was about this time that a fellow trader related to me that W. D. Gann, the world famous market timer, was purported to have said “if you want to know how to time the markets…read the Bible three times!”

I had generally studied the writings of Gann and was frankly never able to get much out of his cryptic and obscure ramblings other than to note his focus on time as opposed to price pattern analysis. Nevertheless, this got me to thinking…is it possible that specific number counts where reversal energy is demonstrably exposed…critical time points I had already identified in my relentless search through endless chart examples…is it possible as some sort of confirming device that those same numbers are numbers prominently mentioned in the sacred texts?

Since it was my custom to regularly read in the Bible, I decided to keep a notebook handy to jot down specific numbers mentioned in the Bible as I came across them. I had no real expectations one way or the other, but I was looking forward to comparing the numbers my private research was turning up with the numbers prominently mentioned in the Bible.

So what did I find? Actually, a head scratching puzzle. What I noticed right away after collecting months of references was that there were an amazing number of near misses…numbers from the Bible that were in most cases off by just one number count from the numbers I had already identified through research.

This wasn’t the only thing that bothered me. I’d been in a quandary for years over a quotation from Jesus found in Luke 24:46 which said “Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.”

With my persistent mindset, I just couldn’t see how Sunday was the third day. It seemed to me that if Christ was crucified on Friday, then Saturday…Sunday… and then Monday should be the third day. It had been a long running and seemingly irreconcilable question in my mind.

Then out of the blue it struck me. To make the biblical order work, you would have to count Friday as day number one! Why this had been so hard for me to see was I suppose understandable. Counting that way was just not how we were taught to count since grade school. Nevertheless, this was a critical breakthrough…since I had now learned how God counts!

The next step was obvious…use the newly learned counting method on the charts I was studying and see how the number counts compared with what I was doing before. I picked up one of my trusty old charts and started counting days forward from an important high point reversal day on the chart.

Immediately, it jumped off the page at me. By adjusting the number count of each newly discovered reversal energy number…by just one day to reflect the new counting method, the correlation between Bible numbers and specific number counts I had already collected were now almost perfectly…in sync!

I say “almost” perfectly because what showed up was a pattern of hits…that is, actual reversal days occurring on the chart that would tend to “hit” (1) on the day just before, (2) right on or (3) the day just after the individual counting number being projected.

This was heady stuff. Clearly, by using the 40 different and proven counting numbers so painstakingly identified through research and confirmed in most cases by biblical references, I could now exactly pinpoint and project into the future perfectly defined and extremely powerful 3 day “reversal zones” or “timing windows”…on any chart for any market…at any time!

It’s important to note that the strongest reversal energy always exhibited itself in the center day of the 3 day zone or window. I don’t know why, but the image of Christ crucified between 2 malefactors came to mind as I worked with this material. And, as it turns out, the idea of a 3 unit zone or window with the most powerful energy focused in the center unit became over time an even more powerful research concept…as we shall soon see.

And here’s another curiosity. Apparently, there’s no way to determine or foretell whether anticipated reversals will be up or down reversals…until you get there. As the market starts to actually trade up or down into the zone or window, then and only then does the market tip it’s hand to us.

And, here’s the really great part…It’s exactly at the critical moment to do something from a market timing standpoint. That is, just before the market reverses…and while concurrently pointing us in the direction the market has just revealed it’s going to go! And, only those that know the language of the markets understand what the markets are saying when they speak.

Amazingly, the markets literally hand us top secret timing information at the critical moment for us to use it for positioning trades in the right direction…and precisely at the right time to be totally in sync with market movement…guaranteed!

Now, here’s how it works. If a market is initially trading down into a 3 day reversal zone, then we should expect a reversal of some consequence to occur to the upside during the period of that reversal zone. The anticipated reversal up is then confirmed on any subsequent day that sees a rally above a previous day’s high. It couldn’t be more simple!

And, conversely, if a market initially trades up into a 3 day reversal zone, we should expect to see a reversal movement to the downside occur. The reversal is then confirmed by any subsequent drop below a previous day’s low.

Another major plus is that this strategy automatically generates a close-in stop or stop/reverse point just on the other side of the recently anticipated and confirmed reversal. This minimizes trade risk tremendously.

It was at this point that it suddenly occurred to me that what was really happening here…in the march of black bars across price charts…was the ongoing record in time of an unbelievable projection process…a process whereby the forward counting of days was tracking some sort of energy ripples radiating forward in time from high and low reversal points in the past.

My research proved this “process” is ongoing. It’s constantly radiating energy off reversal points in the past which projects three day “timing windows” or “reversal zones” into the future…where this reversal “energy” tends to generate new reversal points in interval patterns falling precisely on certain specific number counts…which I now had identified!

But, how could this be? All I could imagine was that some kind of previously unknown wave energy must be radiating off top or bottom reversal points in the past…continually moving out into the future in varying degrees of intensity, set in irregular yet constant intervals…and with enough structured energy to dramatically affect directional turns…in any market…in exactly the same manner and timing count sequence. And all this, at precisely and objectively projected points in time in the future…whew!

Sit back for a moment and think about it. The magnitude of this discovery…let’s say revelation actually, is mind boggling in it’s implication and absolutely astounding in importance! It’s almost as if the curtain has been ripped back and we’re now privileged to look lingeringly at the fabric of space and time…literally, the framework God employs to organize time and event progressions! Shockingly, it would appear that nothing happens by chance!

I knew instinctively that this method of market timing could not be called fundamental or technical analysis…but is rather an entirely new method of market timing analysis which I dubbed temporal analysis since it is based on time instead of price. Indeed, at this point I realized that one of the greatest hallmarks of the newly named Kenison Counting Numbers is the total lack of subjectivity in producing such valuable timing projections.

No guesswork is ever involved. The number counting sequence is simple and easy to understand. You don’t ever need a calculator or computer or any specialized foreknowledge. And, the signals projected are very precise and completely objective. It’s all right there on the chart…exactly where the next reversal energy in the market will be exposed…and correspondingly, exactly where the next projected reversal should be expected!

And get this. Kenison Counting Number projections will never become obsolete. They will continue with absolute objectivity…for all the years of you or your grandson’s trading careers…to pinpoint at or within one day of a specific future number count, exactly where a market reversal of varying degree of magnitude should appear.

How do we know this? Simply because years of exhaustive historical research has proven that whether you’re looking at constructed charts from the last two centuries, the 1970’s or last week, the system would have worked exactly the same in each era…with exactly the same phenomenal results!

And remember, these are the very same timing count numbers confirmed historically and through study of the scriptures to have proven and very definite reversal energy associated with them. Believe me…after learning the Kenison Counting Numbers market timing method, you will never look at a price chart the same again.

I was also extremely gratified to learn through decades of ongoing research that Kenison Counting Numbers work equally well in projecting future reversal points in every market, irregardless of whether it’s a futures, options, stock, forex or cash market…anywhere in the world!

How Kenison Counting Numbers Work…

This totally unique and extremely powerful method’s ability to project important market highs and lows…in the future is uncanny. How does it do it? After decades of personal research, I have identified the exact irregular number sequence the market itself observes. Just count the bars on a price chart forward from any market high or low point in the past and the Kenison Counting Numbers will tell you exactly on which numbers in the sequence you should expect powerful reversal energy to be exposed…in the future…and with a very high degree of reliability! This allows traders to anticipate, confirm and then act on potentially profitable trading turns that others don’t even see coming…or have the slightest idea even exist!

There is nothing subjective about this analysis…it’s entirely objective. It gives you no nonsense exact entry and exit points with close-in and automatic stop loss points. And for the charts you need? They’re free on the internet!

One other thing should be stressed. This is strictly eyeball to chart analysis. No complicated software program or mathematical calculation is ever necessary. With this new life long knowledge, you can spend just moments with a price chart and know with total confidence what your course of action should be…and know with absolute clarity what the risks are…all in advance!

There’s no need to check with anyone first…you’re the expert! Why? Because when you understand this market timing method you’ll know with quiet confidence what the market itself is telling you about current trends and potentially explosive turning points…and exactly when to expect them!

When you see how by simply counting forward and backward in time from important high or low points in the past, you can project important reversal points in the future…believe me, you’ll be hooked! I’ve been hooked now for over 30 years and I’m still fascinated on a daily basis as I watch these turns occur like clockwork in timing windows projected weeks and even months before!

Traders can become expert in using all 40 of the unbelievably powerful Kenison Counting Numbers to project forward in time to exactly where reversal energy will be exposed…in the future!

One of the most impressive Kenison Counting Numbers is represented by Zone 14…especially, when using our simple triangulation techniques in combination with other counting numbers to project powerful conjunction and convergence reversal zones…reversals which begin extremely dynamic high-velocity directional market moves! Other traders marvel at windfall profits that seem to come out of nowhere. Kenison Counting Numbers is the tool that alerts you beforehand thereby allowing you the opportunity to profit from these explosive market moves!

When investors and traders investigate this precision market timing method, they are amazed to discover the natural and irregular rhythm identified in the markets…a rhythm that is constant and traces out exactly the same pattern for all markets worldwide! It’s shocking to see how invariably reversals occur on the same number counts in the Kenison Counting Numbers sequence…over and over again.

And now another amazing fact concerning the Kenison Counting Numbers method…it holds true no matter what time frame you’re looking at! As we already know if you apply the system to a daily chart, you will project daily reversals. But surprisingly, If you also apply it to a weekly chart, you will project weekly reversal points into the future. In fact, the same Kenison Counting Numbers sequence works equally well when applied to monthly, weekly, daily or intra-day charts!

It was exactly at this point that another phenomenal discovery was made. I discovered that you could determine the most likely actual reversal day, week or month within each reversal zone by using the Kenison Counting Numbers to count backward in time from each of the three days, weeks or months within each reversal zone. How does this work? Quite simply, when you count backwards in the fashion mentioned above, you will notice that significant high and low points…in the past…fall exactly on specific number counts in the Kenison Counting Number sequence…but only if you are counting backwards from the most likely actual future day, week or month where the market will reverse! As I witnessed this mirror image or echo effect in action, I realized this is truly a miracle!

This is absolutely astounding when you realize that by counting forward or backwards in time reversal energy is exposed on the same number counts in the Kenison Counting Numbers sequence irregardless of whether you’re counting months, weeks, days or 15 minute intervals on an intra-day price chart! Witness this system in action in real markets in real time and you’ll be totally amazed at the magnitude of this discovery…I guarantee it!

Copyright (c) 2006 Bruce Kenison

How Creating Digital Products Can Give You Passive Income

Have you heard the statistic that millionaires have up to seven income streams? That’s seven different ways that they’re making money each month. Now take a look at your business; how many streams of income do you have?

If the answer is one, then it’s time to open up that creative part of your brain and create more income streams. One option is passive income products.

“Passive income” is something of a misnomer. Creating products or setting up different forms of income still takes work. But the difference is that these streams of income can work for you—almost on autopilot—for years to come.

Benefits of Passive Income

1. Increase your bottom line profits. This is the most obvious benefit, but worth mentioning, because who doesn’t want to earn more profits? And (as you probably well know) limiting your practice to 1:1 coaching can be a “feast or famine” proposition. Passive income streams can help you get through the “famine” times.

But, even in “feast” times, your income from 1:1 coaching is limited to the number of clients you can handle. Passive income streams can help remove that “income ceiling” and create a cushion.

2. Regain time in your day. Hold up… I know I just said that creating products and other streams of income takes time! But jump ahead with me for a minute and think about the back end of the process, when your income stream is completely set up, and the upfront work is done. With a strong marketing plan, you can easily earn money on these passive income streams even while you sleep. That means you can take off a little earlier or take an entire day off for fun, because your “passive” products are still earning money.

3. Increase your credibility by helping more people. Think of passive income as a way to share your expertise with an ever-expanding audience. Imagine a snowball at the top of a mountain representing you with your inner circle of coaching clients. As the snowball travels downhill, it gathers more and more snow until it reaches mammoth size. The same is true of you. As you reach out to more and more people, and providing guidance through your books, webinars, or courses, increased exposure and word of mouth leverage your knowledge and showcase your expertise to more and more people. This all can lead to increased sales and an army of people who rave about your work. So (at least in this case) the snowball effect is a very good thing!

Planning Your Passive Income

Now that I’ve hopefully sold you on the benefits of having passive income streams, it’s time to plan out what those streams should be for your business. Passive income includes affiliate marketing, membership subscriptions, or writing a book. But by far the most popular and engaging is creating courses or digital products based on your coaching specialty.

Digital products allow you to solve other people’s problems from the comfort of your home. And your customers get answers to their particular questions almost immediately, and in a format they can use—their home computer, or smartphone.

“A successful digital product has almost unlimited income potential, and there are dozens of examples of successful digital marketers earning millions of dollars each year from products they released several years ago.” – C.M. Burns, BigHappyProfits.com

Imagine what your business & life could look like, say, if you had your own online course…

✓ Students excited to learn from you

✓ Working fewer hours while transforming more lives (and without exhausting yourself with 1:1 clients)

✓ Building your credibility & becoming an authority in your niche

✓ No more cap on your income

By creating a digital course, you will finally have a valuable business asset you can launch & sell again & again.

Creating Your Product

There are many steps involved in creating a product but once you’ve done one, creating others will be easier. When creating a digital product, you want to be sure to make it relevant to your main topic of interest. So, if you are a health coach, you want your product to be about a health issue, not a career issue. Also, you want to further hone it down by asking your audience what they need. This is something you can determine by quick surveys or just by keeping track of their frequent questions.

Next you need to validate the product, double-checking to make sure it’s the right one. Ask clients if it would be helpful and/or relevant. Put out questions about it on forums. You could even do a prelaunch with valued clients to test the product for you. I have a colleague who I give my products to in exchange for her evaluation of them.

Then you will need to write content for launching and promoting your product, and, finally, determine your pricing.

Launching Your Product

When you are launching a product, you need both a series of anticipation emails, and a series of launch emails.

1) Anticipation emails build excitement. They should be educating your audience on a topic you’re passionate about (and one that’s related to the course you’re selling). And give them a teaser for the product.

2) Launch emails make the offer. They say that the product is ready and point to where people can buy it.

As this marketer puts it:

“With my launches I built up to anticipation over a matter of weeks, not months or years. Each time I talk about it, the likely buyers get more and more excited. Then I give a clear date for when the product will launch and be available for purchase.

“The day before launch I send out a detailed email providing every bit of information my subscribers need in order to make a purchase. This email covers the benefits of the product, pricing information, and even answers frequently asked questions (that actually haven’t been asked yet).

“The one thing the email doesn’t include is a link to buy the product. Instead I tell them exactly when the product will be available (8:00 AM Eastern tomorrow) and to expect another email from me at that time.” – Nathan Barry, Founder, ConvertKit.com

If your launch runs for 5 days you’ll need at least 5 emails. I’ve been on some lists where they sent out two emails a day—sometimes the same email but different subject lines. To me that’s overdoing it, but it depends on your audience as to how often to email them. Keep in mind that they probably don’t read all their emails. So it doesn’t hurt to send out more than one.

Creating Urgency

Here are four easy ways that you can get your on-the-fence customers to purchase now:

1. Have sale or promotional pricing ending soon

2. Make the product available for a limited amount of time

3. Provide an additional bonus only available to the first x number of customers

4. Limit the quantity available for sale

Pick one or two of these strategies that will resonate with your audience. With careful planning, the urgency in your launch emails can boost sales.

In Conclusion

Working with clients one-on-one is great, but it shouldn’t be your entire business model. You need to have some other sources of income that supplement your coaching program. After all, how many times have you had a month with no new clients? With another source of income, that scenario is less painful.

If people don’t know you yet, they’re probably not going to drop $1000 on a coaching program. But they might be willing to take a chance on you for something that costs them $50 or less—because it’s low risk for them.

The good news is that you CAN create passive income with low-end digital products, and, if you need some help,

Learn how to create, package, and launch low-end digital products here: https://contentcreationtoolkit.com/low-end-offer

Azure Technology

Azure is a platform as well as infrastructure useful for cloud computing. It has been created by Microsoft. The key purposes for Azure usage include building, deploying, and managing applications. A global network of Microsoft-managed data centres deploys Azure. This ensures easy data storage and access, along with security.

Azure Benefits offered by Leo TechnoSoft

Azure development company Leo TechnoSoft offers various benefits to develop web solutions using the Azure platform with regards to business, data and management.

Business benefits of Azure

Ability to Scale on Demand: Azure has been built to scale alongside your business. It loads your applications as a cluster allocating a web application to a specific set of processes.

Flexibility: Azure is simple to adapt. It offers a host of application building blocks, along with the services that would allow you to customize the cloud as per your requirement.

Cost Competitive: Azure works with a pay-as-you-go model. This reduces the upfront costs to small businesses. People who have signed a contract can also receive additional enterprise discount.

Customer support: Azure infrastructure is now available in 19 regions across the globe. It has multiple data centre regions. These centre regions provide (and offer) support plans various languages.

Hybrid Capability: Azure provides you with the ability to create hybrid environments.

Pricing: Enterprise with Microsoft Enterprise Agreements receives discounts for Azure ranging from 10-36 percent and upward. In case of no Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, you can buy pre-paid subscriptions; it also qualifies for a discount over on-demand pricing.

Azure Data Benefits

Azure development company Leo TechnoSoft guarantees following data benefits to the users:

Big Data insights: Microsoft Azure HD insight service brings an Apache Hadoop solution to the cloud. It integrates with Excel and allows you to visualize your data in new ways, with regards to uncovering the business insights that would help you to succeed.

Simple and Reliable Data Storage: Azure allows you to store (or share) any type of data in a reliable and fast environment. This includes file data, structured data sets or even queries.

Data Security: Azure was built on the basis of Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle. Based on proven technology and tested around the globe, Azure has the most secure code.

Reliable Backups: Azure always backs up 6 copies of your data. This backup is stored across two separate Azure data centres. This guarantees 99.9% availability of backups.

Integrative Data Solution: Azure integrates data across the full line of Microsoft PaaS and SaaS offerings.

Azure Management Benefits

Azure development company Leo TechnoSoft helps users to manage their data storage and data access via following management benefits:

Automation: Azure Automation would allow you to automate all your tasks in your own customized Azure environment. It offers rapidly build powerful integration solutions.

API Management: Azure API management would allow you to publish APIs to your market (that includes employees or customers) securely and at scale if you create and run a variety of APIs.

Easy scheduling: Azure would allow you to create jobs on complex or simple recurring schedules.

Ability to Run Virtual Machines: Azure allows you to deploy premium virtual machines in minutes including Linux and Windows servers.

Developer Collaboration and Options: Visual Studio Online and Application Insights are available in Azure. These two features provide enhanced collaboration between your dev teams in integrative environment.

Availability of multiple orchestration cluster management tools: Azure has multiple orchestration cluster management tools available for user by default. These tools include Apache Mesos or Docker Swarm. Orchestrators are supported in the Azure Resources Manager API and have ARM templates

Viral Marketing in the New Millennium

Have you noticed there are more and more widgets, gadgets and other technologies being marketed today than ever and we’re all eating it up? We have to have the latest and greatest. What’s with that? Are we just not connected enough? Everything being developed is faster and it’s supposed to save us time when in fact, we’re busier than ever!

With the increasingly popular sites like MySpace, YouTube, flickr, Facebook etc. it’s no wonder the world is getting smaller. Viral marketing on the Internet is becoming increasingly popular because it targets young consumers who are turning away from the normal channels of advertising. Even Time Magazine voted “YOU” as the person of the year.

Recently Bill Gates said “the next 10 years will bring “extraordinary” changes to the world. The digital revolution is proceeding to change the way we live and work”. It has already started with telephone networks disappearing and becoming an application of the Internet. For example, VOIP or voice over internet protocol has become popular and increasingly new technologies are emerging.

Technology companies are competing to find the fastest and most effective way for people to communicate. Everyone is after a piece of the pie.

For the past five years, VM Direct and it’s helloWorld products have launched their video products on a single web-based platform, including emailing, blogging, podcasting, social networking, live broadcasting, subscription to RSS feed, posting music, photos and more! Imagine! a one stop shop for all your needs! It does not get better than that!

Whether you’re marketing yourself, your business or sharing of information with family, there is never a better way to do it other than face to face communication. This is why video streaming has become so popular and cost effective.

Keep in mind what your point is, how and who do you want to communicate with in the most effective way? Remember, we all learn and understand differently. Interesting facts:

People remember:

10% of what they read

20% of what they hear

30% of what they see

50% of what they see and hear together.

And 80% of what they see, hear and do.

55% of a message meaning is derived from facial expression; 38% of a message meaning is derived from gestures, body language etc. (source: Dr. Mehrablans, Author of the most widely referenced study of Communications)

Start thinking outside the box and start using the technologies available today to increase your business by using face to face technology.

Creating an Ecommerce Website

Selling products on-line requires a very different setup from your run-of-the-mill blogging site. Lets look at the things you’ll need to think about when setting up an eCommerce website and help to explain why they cost more to design.

First let me tell you what we’re not going to cover in this article.

We’re not assuming that an eCommerce website is a single web page with some PayPal button codes inserted onto it.

The PayPal buttons are great and work very well for those selling a handful of items, but we’re taking eCommerce to the next level and giving the customer a better on-line shopping experience.

Most modern eCommerce website are applications. They have a user interface, administration settings, store data in a database and follow a work-flow of processes. We’re going to touch on some of these areas.

The Basics

An eCommerce website can be thought of as a play with actors performing it’s scenes.

The main actors in an eCommerce website are:

* The Customer – buys products

* The Website Owner – ships bought products & gets paid

* The eCommerce Application – interface between all the actors

* The Payment Gateway – handles payment transactions (more on this later)

* The Merchant/Business Bank Account – Website owner’s business bank account (more on this later)

The main buying process of an eCommerce website (‘the play’) happens as follows:

1. Customer browses product catalogue

2. Customer adds product to basket

3. Customer buys product and enters check-out process

4. eCommerce Application contacts a Payment Gateway

5. Payment Gateway provides secure customer shipping and payment details entry form

6. Customer securely enters shipping and payment information

7. Payment Gateway contacts Website Owners’ Merchant Bank Account

8. Merchant Bank Account processes payment transaction and returns control to Payment Gateway

9. Payment Gateway returns Customer to eCommerce Application

10. eCommerce Application notifies Customer of successful (or failed) payment

11. eCommerce Application notifies Website Owner of purchase

12. Website Owner ships product to Customer

Of course there’s a lot more detail going on in each step, but hopefully you get the general idea that setting up an eCommerce application is a tad more complicated than your regular blog-style website.

Where Do You Start?

Sounds silly right, but the first step you need to do is think about the types of things you’ll be selling on-line.

Are these products?, i.e. physical items that require packaging and posting or services provided by yourself or another provider e.g. Professional Yak Grooming.

How may products or types of services are you going to offer? Local or International? Are some seasonal? Do you have a finite stock level for particular items? Do you plan to use special offers & discounts? Do you even like yaks?

This leads to customer and payment questions.

Who are your customers? Where are they? How are they going to pay; credit card, cheque, PayPal? Which bank account will I need to set up?

And then there are the support questions.

How do you handle returned goods? How do you refund payments? How do you handle complaints?

Having a think about the products and services you’re going to offer is vital because the first thing a web designer is going to ask you when you’re requesting a quote is “How many things are you selling and to whom?”

The reason is of course time and costs.

Selling 50 products to a UK only customer base using PayPal requires a very different setup and hence costs, to one selling 1000+ products internationally and taking credit card payments.

Lets look closer at some of the important eCommerce application areas.

The eCommerce Application

Essentially, an eCommerce application is a bespoke Content Management System (CMS). So as well as updating posts and blogs it specialises in updating products and services and supporting commerce functions.

Like any CMS, the application splits the eCommerce website into two major parts; the front-end or shop-front where the customer can browse and buy goods and the back-end where you login to an administration dashboard and manage the website options, including the product catalogue.

The Product Catalogue

This will likely be your most important concern and is central to any eCommerce website design.

The product catalogue is where all your goods-for-sale data lives. The product name, description, cost, stock level, pictures etc. are all stored in here.

We sometimes get people asking which files their products are stored in and they get in bit of a tizzy when they can’t find them on the server.

Usually, product catalogues are stored in a database, but don’t worry – you don’t have to know how to use a database. The eCommerce application does that for you through the product catalogue interface in the Administration Dashboard.

Being able to manage this yourself is vital, otherwise you’ll be going back and forward to the web developer and the costs will rack up.

Thankfully, the eCommerce applications that we use, Magento and WordPress e-Commerce, once installed, allow you to manage your own product catalogue from within the web browser.

The Magento product catalogue has advanced options and allows for things like adding discount codes, customer reviews, product videos etc., whereas the WordPress e-Commerce catalogue offers a simpler solution while still covering the essential requirements you’ll need to sell stuff on-line.

So how do you go about entering and updating all this product information?

The Admin Dashboard

Accessing a special web page on your site and entering a username and password will take you to the options part of your eCommerce website. This is commonly known as the Admin Dashboard.

Here, you will be able to update almost every aspect of the website including accessing the product catalogue, shipping costs, currency exchange rates, payment gateways, sales reports etc.

Whichever eCommerce solution you choose from us, we’ll setup some or all of your product catalogue and make sure that customers can purchase items and that you get paid through a payment gateway (more on that late

The Shop Design

Of course your shop will need a look and feel to fit in with your business brand.

Again, just like other CMS’s a web designer will be needed to develop a theme or template which will transform the default shop-front into whatever design you have in mind for your customers.

Themes can be bought off-the-shelf for both WordPress e-Commere and Magento and you can apply these yourself, however, you may prefer to have a design exactly the way you imagined it and different from any of your competitors.

Themes are applied from the Administration Dashboard. You may be able to change a few aspects of the theme, such as your logo, background colour, text colour, however, you’re not going to be able to move parts of the theme around to different areas of the screen. A web designer will need to do this by updating the theme’s code.

Domain Name and Website Hosting

You will of course need a domain name to trade with and a hosting plan to store the website files and databases.

It’s usually best not to purchase a hosting plan until you’ve spoken to a web designer and they have given you an idea of the best solution to implement.

Many of the cheaper hosting plans that are offered to you when purchasing a domain name, do not support databases or database applications. They may charge an extra setup and yearly fee for setting this up.

So try to avoid buying a hosting plan until you talk to a web designer and have an idea of the type of eCommerce solution you’ll need to implement your ideas.

Merchant Bank Accounts vs Business Bank Accounts

Certainly in the UK, you must have a business bank account to legally trade as a business.

Business bank accounts can be used just fine with an eCommerce application but you will need to setup a Payment Gateway service to handle the payment transactions and get the customers money into your bank account.

If you’re opening up a business bank account and your account manager knows you’re going to be running an eCommerce website you may be offered a merchant bank account which is a specialised version of the business account.

The merchant account gives you a Merchant ID number and access to a Payment Gateway service that the bank uses or owns.

It’s likely you’ll need to pay for the setup of a merchant account and it will incur fees, usually on a per-transaction basis.

If you have already setup a merchant account then you will need to make sure your eCommerce application can support the particular payment gateway your bank has given you access to, otherwise you won’t get your money.

e.g. Lloyds TSB uses the Cardnet merchant payment gateway. Royal Bank of Scotland uses the WorldPay merchant payment gateway.

If you were a Royal Bank of Scotland business customer with a merchant account, you would need to make sure your eCommerce application supported the WorldPay gateway.

You don’t need to use the particular merchant account that your business bank offers to trade on-line, but you do need a payment gateway of some sort to handle payments.

That leads us nicely onto payment gateways.

Payment Gateways

We’ve touched on this in the previous section. Essentially, a merchant bank account will give you a payment gateway to use, but you’re limited to just the one that your business bank is affiliated with.

A payment gateway is a service offered by a company.

It handles the payment part of the eCommerce application when a customer proceeds to the checkout to purchase an item.

The payment gateway collects the customers details and payment information securely and contacts your business bank account to complete the money transaction.

This is great for security too as your customers banking details aren’t kept on your eCommerce website, so that’s one less thing to worry about securing.

There are many different payment gateway services with different features and options. As a supplied service they all charge a fee for their use. The fees can include a setup charge and a % commission of the total price of a transaction.

Some payment gateways allow you to pay a monthly or annual fee if your number of transactions are high. This can work out more cost effective for you if your single transactions are high volume but low individual cost.

You’ve probably heard of some of the more well known gateway service providers and not known what they. You’ve also likely used them without even realising they are there. Some of the popular payment gateways are:

PayPal, Google Checkout, SagePay, WorldPay and ChronoPay.

It’s great that you have a choice and the services are very competitively priced so take some time to check out which is best for your business model. If you need some help, we’d be happy to meet up and walk you through the options.

Some payment gateways offer two types of general services; hosted and inclusive.

Hosted Payment Gateways

These options usually don’t require a set-up or monthly fee, however, transaction costs can be higher than an inclusive service.

The PayPal Website Payments Standard service is a good example of this.

Essentially, it limits your customers to having a PayPal account (they must register with the PayPal site) and when it comes to check-out, the customers are transferred from your eCommerce website to the PayPal website for the information gathering and payment transaction, then upon completion redirected back to your eCommerce website.

The downside of this method is really from a branding point of view. You have very limited control of how the payment gateway service, PayPal in this case, looks and operates before it redirects back to your website.

Some customers can be put off by redirecting to another site as confidence in security can be questioned (although PayPal in this instance has a very good reputation).

You’re also limiting the payment method to just those customers who are willing to use the payment gateway’s choice of payment. In this case, the customer must have a registered PayPal account.

A similar process happens if you use the Google Checkout payment gateway.

So what’s the other option?

Inclusive Payment Gateways

Inclusive payment gateways will allow your customers to go through the whole checkout process without (the appearance of) leaving your branded eCommerce website.

I added in “the appearance of” because in some cases your customers will actually leave your website and use the payment gateway service, however, the way it is implemented and embedded makes it looks as if it’s all part of your website and business brand.

So what’s the catch?

There’s usually a setup fee, a minimum subscription period (say 12 months), a monthly fee and of course a whole heap of conditions that apply.

Some particular conditions to look out for are thresholds on the number of transactions per month, or total monthly funds transferred. Payment gateway services can charge extra or insist you upgrade your service if these thresholds are exceeded in a similar way that mobile phone companies will charge you extra if you use up all your inclusive talk or SMS time.

The best benefit of using an inclusive payment gateway is that the whole customer experience from browsing to payment is hosted on your own website. This gives the customer a greater sense of confidence that their data will be kept safe and makes your whole business look and feel more professional.

A good example of this type of service is the PayPal Web Payments Pro.

Securing The Data

If you’re using a payment gateway then the good news is it’s unlikely you’ll be storing sensitive customer payment details on your eCommerce website.

Those types of data will be kept securely in your payment gateway account.

Of course you will be collecting a whole lot of other important and confidential customer information such as name, email, perhaps address, likes, dislikes, a username and password for your site.

All this information needs to be kept secure and your eCommerce application will help with that. The Administration Dashboard will have lots of sections that control who and what can see parts of the collected data.

But that’s not the only security you’ll have to think about. Do you know what happens when you fill out a form on a website and click on submit?

If you have a look at the top of the web browser in the address bar you’ll see the website’s URL address. Most sites will start with http://

(For those that want to know, URL stands for Uniform Resource Location and HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)

Any web page starting with http:// is transferring data to and from a web server in Plain Text.

This means, that the web page contents, code, images, text, form data are all sent in a format that’s readable to humans. OK, it may not be that readable, but in essence all the information is there in English characters (or whatever language character set your website uses).

Now for some more techie stuff.

When your web page is sent to or received from a web server, there isn’t a 1-to-1 direct connection between your website and the server. The web page data is transferred through hundreds of networks across different countries and through thousands of routing computers and other network devices before arriving at your computer.

This means that at any point during it’s travel, your web page data has the potential to be intercepted and read by whomever.

There isn’t much you can do about the interception part but there is something you can do to make it a darn lot harder for somebody to read and use your eCommerce web page data.

SSL Certificates

Now we’re talking.

Let’s skip the techie bit and quickly tell you what these are and what they do.

You buy an SSL certificate from a web hosting company (annual renewal most likely), install it into your eCommerce website and it encrypts your web page data. Hooorah!

You’ll now notice that parts of your website, likely those that require personal form data to be collected and sent, now start with https://

The addition of that little “s” letter, standing for “Secure”, means that the web page data is encrypted when sent and decoded only at the two end-points; your computer and a web server.

Anyone reading the page in between will see garbled non-readable characters.

You may also see additional signs of a secured web page such as a closed padlock icon.

We would strongly advise you buy an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate and get this installed and configured for use with your hosting account and eCommerce website.

In Summary

Creating an eCommerce website requires a fair amount of planning.

You’ll need a good web design and web development team to implement your business venture.

It will cost you more and take longer to create than a regular blog or brochure-ware website because of all the design and setup.

You’ll make money – and that’s what’s it’s all about after all…

We hope this helps you start your eCommerce website journey. Of course there’s a heap of things we just didn’t have the time to cover.

Learn more about eCommerce at our website.

Advantages Of Having A Direct Inward Dial Number

Every company makes use of certain communication system to get connected to his employees. Communication is an integral part of any business. Thus, various companies use direct inward dial number to reduce the cost of calls. This is a telecommunication services offered by telephone companies to all those subscribers who operate private branch exchange system.

These direct inward dial services provide every employee their own toll-free number. Like in case of a company if a client wants to talk to an employer, he directly gets connected to that particular employer instead of a receptionist diverting a call to that particular employer.

The benefits of having a direct inward dial number-

-A direct inward dial number is easy to get and it saves lots of money as one need not purchase multiple connections and multiple telephones. In fact, for managing these telephones, there is a requirement of an attendant to look after incoming or outgoing calls. All these lead of reduction in cost.

– It saves a lot of time as one receives the calls directly without any intervention of a mediator. This is the actual benefit of having a direct inward dial number.

-Higher costumer appreciation- costumer feels that they are provided with better services when they are able to make direct contact with the desired person without intervention of a mediator thus saving time and efforts. This is most comforting for a costumer to talk to an employee directly.

-Communication becomes effective as no calls go unattended. In fact, one does not need an in-house PBX for every connection. Thus, this makes the work even easier.

-One can manage communication with ease and communication remains efficient throughout the process.

-Cost effective as it is cheaper than normal phone calls. Once registered everything is free which includes installation as well.

-Direct inward dial number allows easy access to its services. They provide the users with a page which provides all the necessary details for managing the account.

– Customisation is considered another best and desired feature. Through this option one has the option of entering the last 4 digits of his choice. If already chosen, then few other options are displayed. And the user is supposed to choose from those numbers displayed.

-Easy implementation-

One need not to give a second thought prior to the implementation of a direct inward dial number as it is easy to implement these services. One just needs to fill the online form and payment details to avail the facilities.

-Easy cancellation-

Like implementation, cancellation is also really easy. These services are provided on a monthly basis. As soon as one wants to opt out he/she just need to notify. If he/she didn’t recharge, his subscription will get expired.

These services are best as they provide many SIP trunk likes to get connected with the PBX. As mentioned earlier, no calls go unanswered as for convenience; these calls are forwarded to a mobile phone as well. One has to even choose a call forwarding setting for allowing call forwarding.

In fact, for emergency services the newer dial inward dial number is available which get setup within 5 minutes.

When Being "Disruptive" is a Good Thing

Someone or something that is disruptive is usually associated in the negative. The sub-prime mortgage crisis has disrupted financial and housing markets. That’s bad. My son was being disruptive at dinner while someone else was talking. That’s bad too.

But I believe the idea of being deliberately disruptive can be a huge positive when used in the development of strategies, organizations, products, business models and markets. Specifically, disruption can be useful for those companies that are trying to serve low income markets and eradicate poverty, all while building a successful business venture.

Back in early 2005, I read CK Pralahad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Solution ust as I started my new job General Manager of the Emerging Markets Platforms Group at Intel. Our group was responsible for developing and selling new PC and mobile products designed to meet the specific needs of those at the bottom of the pyramid. One of these products is the Classmate PC, which has become famous mostly because of the ongoing public battle between it and Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC XO laptop.

The theories put forward in Prahalad’s and Christensen’s books, combined with my experience trying to create a viable business with customers that make only $1 to $2 a day, is the foundation on which my belief that a disruptive approach is the way to go when building businesses focused on selling and improving the lives of the poor.

When I talk about being disruptive, I’m talking about strategies and techniques that change the game, overturn the status quo, and ultimately make the biggest possible impact. In this post, I will touch on the following areas where I think disruptive strategies are required:

  • Product strategy
  • Business models
  • Leadership and management

Disruptive Product Strategies

Let’s start with the product strategy. Clayton Christensen’s theory is that a disruptive innovation or technology is a product that is easier to use, more affordable and adds a unique value that the market leading product does not. These products become wildly successful, often completely displacing the existing product or technology. Think of the PC displacing the mini-computer. The telephone displacing the telegraph. Digital photos displacing traditional photos. The list goes on. Will the mobile phone displace the PC? Maybe. If it does, then it becomes a disruption to the PC.

I believe the product that will displace the PC will come from a company that has developed an easy to use, affordable device that has some very useful “unique” value to those at the bottom of the pyramid. That was my conclusion after reading Prahalad and Christensen – and was the path I wanted to set Intel on.

Classmate PC is not a disruptive innovation. The idea was to create R&D labs in four emerging market countries and incubate various devices based on ethnographic research done in those regions. Unfortunately, because of the world’s attention on Negroponte’s OLPC and the competitive pressure it put on Intel (the XO uses AMD chips, Intel’s competitor), the Classmate PC project has sucked up most of the available resources and thus I think it is unlikely that Intel will create that disruptive device, and as such, is not taking the world by storm (at least not yet).

Is OLPC’s XO a disruptive innovation? Probably not. It has some differentiating qualities in the “unique value” category but nothing that are mind-blowing new or different. A unique value is usually very straightforward. The phone let you talk vs. tap on the telegraph. The transistor radio was portable. The unique value is usually a gaming-changing quality. It also strives to be more affordable, although any computer device runs into the same challenges of the floor on component and distribution costs and economics. It has been built with an interface that works to improve ease of use, but often these features are skin deep and are challenged, as you get deeper into the software and content.

There is nothing to stop either device from eventually becoming a disruptive innovation … many innovations are iterative vs. incremental.

Disruptive Business Models

In general, the penetration of tech products into emerging markets has not made a significant impact in closing the digital divide, even with higher overall growth rates than typically found in mature market countries (the mobile phone being the exception). Some argue it is the lack of one or more of the “disruptive” product attributes (affordability, ease of use, value). Maybe.

Again, looking just at PC affordability specifically, there have been a multitude of ventures that have aimed to close the PC divide by delivering very cheap, and sometimes free, computers. None of these ventures have taken off in a large scale, at least those that I am aware of. Please point me to any that are successful (e.g., that have shipped millions of units in at least 5 or more countries on different continents).

I think the key is that the business model strategy is often given a lower priority than product development. The business model that is needed in emerging markets is very different than what necessarily works in traditional markets.

Take pricing for example. Not the actual price, but how the “pricing model” works. One of the reasons mobile phones are so successful is that it meets the qualities of a disruptive innovation AND has a business model that allows very poor people to purchase phone service. In most emerging markets the prominent method of payment is through pre-paid cards vs. subscriptions. Safaricom has disrupted the billing model even more – they bill in seconds vs. minutes. Safaricom is a poster child for a company that seems to understand how to create a successful business in Kenya for the BoP. I recently wrote an article on my blog, Disruptive Leadership, that explores Safaricom’s disruptive business processes titled “Safaricom has figured it out.”

So you’d think that a similar model could work for the PC — offer a pay-as-you-go service for the PC through a subscription or pre-paid cards. Microsoft introduced such a service called in 2006 and it has yet to scale beyond small trials. Securing the PC and its components against resale (a PC is an open device with multiple replaceable parts, unlike the mobile phone) and getting banks to offer financing services are just two of the challenges plaguing the project. Bottom line: the business model has to be appropriate for the specific device or solution.

Beyond the pricing model, a disruptive strategy may be needed to think about how a company gets the product to the customer (at Intel, we called this channels). Outside the big cities in many developing countries, especially Africa, there are little or no retail outlets for PCs. How do you get PCs to a customer when you don’t have a channel?

One out-of-the-box idea is to sell PCs through the post office. We at Intel looked at doing this in Egypt with a government joint venture to increase PC access in areas outside Cairo and Alexandria, the two major cities in Egypt. There are few PC stores in the smaller towns and villages, but there is always a post office. We started a project to get PC’s into the post offices where people could purchase the PC directly.

Finally, I’d like to stretch the definition of a business model to include how the company is set up and functions. Should the company be set up as a for-profit enterprise with the mission to create a successful, high growth venture that brings a return to its investors (e.g., Intel), or should it be setup as a non-profit that depends on donations and grants to fund its operations even when selling an actual product (e.g., OLPC)? I have made the argument that OLPC would be much more successful in achieving its objectives if it was a for-profit enterprise, discussed in detail at OLPCNews.com. By the virtue of the number of comments and their intensity, this article clearly struck a nerve. Or maybe I’m wrong…maybe the most successful “company” model is a hybrid between a for-profit and nonprofit. This is something I would like to explore more in future posts.

Disruptive Leadership

I posit that in addition to a disruptive innovation and business model, you need “disruptive leadership.” I believe disruptive leadership captures the essence of what it takes to be successful as a business leader that is trying to crack the secret formula of growing in very dynamic emerging markets.

I didn’t invent the term “disruptive leadership;” just Google the term and you’ll find interesting articles, like this one by Edward Marx in which he states:

“If I am not upsetting the proverbial apple cart, then I am adding little value. By merely maintaining what has been done in the past, I will bring about little if any gain. Don’t misunderstand. This is not about stirring the pot for the sake of stirring the pot. Disruptive leadership must be purposeful and backed by a vision.”

Another good one by Ted Santos talks about how good leaders create problems:

“What separates extraordinary leaders from managers? One way to distinguish the difference is to compare the mindset of leaders and managers. Managers are great at solving problems. Leaders, on the other hand, exude their greatness by creating problems.”

A disruptive leader stirs the pot, thinks out of the box, is willing to challenge the norm, thrives on change and uncertainty, and most importantly of all, can navigate the turbulent political waters that inevitably are created in reaction to the various disruptive strategies AND leaders. A disruptive leader creates a company culture that embraces all of these concepts.

These leaders are few and far between. I loved a quote from a recent article in the Economist on the career of Mr Ramadorai, CEO of one of India’s largest software outsourcing company, on how believes dealing with adversity only makes companies stronger. “If everything is peaceful, you don’t push yourself,” he says.

“Adversity” has negative connotations, just like the word “disruptive.” But as Mr. Ramadorai says, adversity makes you stronger. I think being disruptive does too.

Winning With Technology In Self Storage

Technology may not be the driving force behind the phenomenal growth of the self storage industry, but it sure complements the activity, adding to the capacity for generating a return in the business and expanding the possibilities in customer service. Long a dream for many self storage operators, the technology to operate an unmanned facility, leads the list and stands as an example of technological innovations that offer solutions. These electronic systems provide efficient service assistance to customers, freeing time for management staff members, and allow owners to generate a healthier net operating income.

The impact of the gains in technological improvements to the practice of operating self storage may be hard to measure for each individual location, but a bird’s-eye view shows the contrast between the have’ and the have not’s. Go to the intersection of highways 24 and 28 in Anderson, South Carolina, a county seat just about halfway down Interstate 85 between Charlotte, NC and Atlanta, GA. From that intersection take each of the main roads–north, south, east, and west–and you’ll find no less than six storage facilities within two miles. That’s about average for most towns, it seems.

Expectedly, the oldest ramshackle building has an office in another business building on an adjacent piece of property, not even a hint of security, and little curb appeal. The newest, Westside Storage, right beside the area high school has great visibility for the store that has one first-phase building complete and two additional building pads ready to be poured. Great signage calls attention to the features of available storage with state of the art security features. In between, there are the fenced and unfenced stores that feature “Boat and RV Storage,” especially the ones on Highway 24, the most direct route from downtown to Lake Hartwell to the south and west.

The results of your short ride will readily reveal why one or two of the properties show up on brokers’ lists, ready to be sold. As in many lines of business, new competition and demographic shifts in the neighborhood dictate new approaches. In this neighborhood, the more industrial side of the town known as The Electric City, changes come as giant corporations decide whether or not their Anderson branch will stay or go. This southern city, within 20 miles of Clemson University and the research infrastructure it attracts, still holds onto names like Michelin and Honeywell, but has lost facilities and jobs for many of the old-line big names in textiles. The changes are apparent as witnessed by the contrast of new sub-division signs right alongside those that indicate “This Industrial Site is Now Available.”

For the owner or prospective investor, the answer to how to make a go of it rests on the ability to compete. Technological innovations and improvements in the way we do things open the door to generating profits more efficiently. The changes cover the scope of all we do, even from the initial evaluation. Market survey methods, architectural and engineering processes, building materials, construction procedures, security systems, accounting and management systems, and customer services all see innovation and change that make operating a business different. We save time and money. We make operations easier. We make our services more convenient and easy to use.

In a recent Self Storage Developer’s Seminar, one of the industry’s popular consultants showed maps of recent site surveys and commented, “We used to concentrate on the three-mile radius around each site under consideration. Now, with neighborhood transportation transitions, we look at a ten-minute drive. People are more mobile and the traffic management design for each area of the city has a significant impact on the proposed business and its ability to attract customers.”

Paul McElreath works with architects, engineers, and owners to depict all the features and support infrastructure of wiring and conduit for the sophisticated security systems furnished by Digitech International, specialists in security for the self-storage industry. “Each architect used to draft drawings by hand. We would get them and have to manually add our system information to the mechanical drawings, and then move them along to the general contractor. Counting the mailing time, that was a process that could easily take three weeks or more.” Pointing to his computer screen, he adds, “Now, it just takes a few seconds for an architect to e-mail a set of prints. We use a CAD (Computer Assisted Drawing) program to add a few lines, attach symbols, and drag’n’drop a few icons onto the drawing and we’re ready to send them out again within a few hours, depicting a complete system layout. It’s amazingly fast to use the tools that computers make available to us.”

What he says is true in moving information as well. Practical web-based management software solutions have appealed to early adopters who want to leverage the power of the Internet to make operating information available instantly and at virtually any computer terminal or laptop wherever they might be in the world. “The technology involved in parking vital information on a remote storage archive in somebody’s corporate server farm seems alien to some owners who think they still have to maintain local control of their operating data,” says Markus Hecker of SMD Software of Raleigh, NC. “Others, including some of the large real estate investment trusts that own multiple properties, and are gobbling up more through consolidation purchases, see the value of having all the data available instantly for evaluation back at the home office.” His counterpart at Centershift, one of the first software development companies to embrace the model, says that issues of security and redundancy were part of the original design, so that they would never need to be a worry for owners and operators, offering full time operational reliability. These firms, along with many of their competitors, now offer some form of remote information gathering, processing, and delivery.

Timely and convenient customer service and the age-old drive to conserve operating capital by reducing overhead influences the rapidly evolving business of ATM-like kiosks, self-service rental stations, appearing at storage centers in neighborhoods around the country. Notables like Shurgard and Public Storage join the few early adopters in adding the devices and processes in at least a few stores. Robert Chiti, President and CEO of Open Tech Alliance of Scottsdale, AZ, says, “The self-service rental station includes a method for each prospect to initiate a conversation with the home office call center, if they need to, but the tools are built in to allow each step of the process to be automated on the spot. With prompting and on-board video instructions, a customer can go through the steps to complete a lease and be accepted for an immediate move-in.” Positioned more as a manager’s assistant, rather than a management replacement, self-service kiosks offer hope to owners who want to cut away overhead.

Jefferson Shreve, the principal in Storage Express, owner operators of more than 65 storage locations dotting the Midwest, built an original business model around operating unmanned sites. “We started out in secondary markets, challenged to support the cost of operation for smaller facilities. Our average investment gave us about 22,000 rentable square feet, not enough to pay a lot of overhead. We had to find ways to compete effectively with the other properties.” Shreve says they are beyond the testing stage. They invest in the DSL or TV Cable connections that give them high-speed access to the Internet at each site. “We have about five sites now that have the kiosks in place, with orders for another five. That complements what we have been doing with access control and security for each location. Now we can lease properties and keep an eye on them with remote video across the Internet. The innovations have given us tools that allow us to do a better job and still keep the overhead under control.”

Shelly Gibson serves as Training Coordinator for Universal Management of Atlanta, GA, a firm fielding more than 100 employees to staff the more than 40 stores that make up its current roster of contracted clients. “When we’re recruiting, all the new technology at the store level puts more pressure on us to hire right to begin with. We have to be much more careful. Computer skills are an absolute, and we need people who can roll with what comes, because change is constant.” She details her experience, “I started out as a driver of the free move-in truck and part-time manager back in the days when our gate control system was operated with a little Tandy computer. The whole process is so much more in depth now. It takes a lot more training.”

One of her fellow workers, a trainee, and the manager of Quality Self Storage in Roswell, GA, Vanni Hardy, says she has seen many good changes in her twelve years in the business. “All of these things we used to have to do manually were time consuming for us and the customers. Just completing a lease took at least twenty, and usually thirty minutes. Now, the process is more complex and the lease includes a lot more, but we can get it done efficiently within about ten minutes.” Reflecting on what some of the innovations mean to customers, Vanni continues, “People come in to the office and see the monitors on display and it makes them feel secure, even though we don’t use that word “security” anywhere. We have the site graphics display as well. I show the prospects that we can easily keep track of who is on site and which units are being used. They understand it, and it’s impressive to them. It actually makes it easier to explain why we need all the background information as we put together their customer file.”

One of the demands placed on operators within our contemporary society, especially since the terrorist attacks we refer to as 9/11/01, is collecting accurate tenant information. With scrutiny in our industry what it is, or what it has become, the liability for not discriminating in the rental process has increased dramatically. “Our customers, political leaders, and the community-at-large demand a higher level of public and personal safety than previously expected,” says Michael T. Scanlon, Jr., Self Storage Association President and CEO. “Counter Measures is a program we introduced for our members last year that revolutionizes the process at the rental counter. It’s an instant verification of personal information including ID, credit scoring, bankruptcy record, criminal background check, and free monthly updates on customer addresses and information.” Available by subscription through the Self Storage Association in Springfield, VA, the program requires a computer connection by dial-up or high-speed modem. The program is designed to help owners with verification of information for both potential customers and employees.

Vanni Hardy, continuing to comment on the positive changes she has seen come through technological improvements says, “In our store, which is a multi-story climate controlled environment, we have intercoms throughout the building. That saves a lot of walking for our customers and the managers too.” James Doman, Manager for Secured Self Storage in Asheville, NC agrees. “The system we use has the intercom stations tied to the telephone system. When a tenant needs a question answered, they press the call button and it rings my cordless telephone. That way, with the long-range telephone I wear on my belt, I can be anywhere on the site, or even off the site. I can respond to them and get them the information they need.” Underscoring the importance of the convenience he says, “I’ve heard there are larger stores than mine that have as many as forty-eight stations interfaced to the telephone system, but mine isn’t that large. It sure makes it easier for customers though. Another thing that makes my life easier is that, if I need to, I can open the gate from any location on the facility by simply hitting the number 9 on my cordless phone.”

Mike Mead, an electrical engineer by training has been installing electronic security systems for owners of self-storage across the State of Texas for nearly two decades. Owner of Dallas Automatic Gates, Mike says, “Some of the biggest changes we’ve seen are making it easier to install the security systems quicker, and they’re more thorough too. The latch-type alarm contact for individual unit door alarms is a great improvement over the dual contact switches we used to attach to the door track. They’re all reliable when they’re installed correctly, but the QuickSwitch and LatchGuard can be installed a lot quicker, saving both time and money.” The activating device attaches to the door track. Rectangular in form, it creates a collar around the door latch. As the latch is moved to unlatch the door curtain, a magnetically sensitive switch embedded in the collar senses the movement. As with any of the door alarm systems, if a valid code is not entered in the access control system, and the unit door is opened, an alarm will sound.

“The biggest competitive advantage that’s new amongst the security tools now available for owners of self storage to use is the wireless door alarms.” Small, battery-powered transmitters installed at the exterior of the doorway to each unit serve a similar purpose. If the door is moved without a verification code being approved by the software system, an alarm sounds. “The fact that the system can be installed without having to enter each unit makes it an addition that even existing facilities can use,” Mead continues. “New technology may have hurt some of the little guys a bit, but not all. We’re helping several owners refurbish their older sites to keep up with the newer competition. With the wireless door alarms, new cameras, and some added curb appeal, they’re able to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak.”

As Jefferson Shreve and others have proved, the tools of technology make operating a smaller site more feasible. At the same time, Michael McGowan, active in acquisitions for Public Storage, Inc., the nation’s largest operator, says, “Maybe it’s coincidence, and it has to do with the markets where we look for properties, but we just don’t see properties that don’t have the bells and whistles for operations and security. We’re a big believer in the tools ourselves, and it looks like other owners are making them pay off as well.”

Technology and innovation will continue to impact the way we do business. We want to find faster and more efficient systems, less expensive materials, and better processes to achieve our profit goals. Like they say in business and design schools across the land–do it faster, cheaper, and better. You can win.

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