It's a people business

Like it or not, you’re in a people business. Professional firms in particular rely almost exclusively on their people and their skills, networks and training for delivering services to clients. These people can be hard to replace, unlike lower skilled jobs which are highly replaceable (for example in retail or manufacturing). So why is it that so many professional firms largely ignore their own people in their strategic business development messages?

Are Australian professional businesses gripped by some sort of corporate social anxiety? Why is it so common for businesses that market to other businesses to ignore their own professional staff? Sometimes they even perversely use generic corporate images (showing some politically correct racial mix of Black American, Mexican, Caucasian and Asian all in suits) rather than images of their own people.

Whenever I am asked to review or audit a business’ marketing and BD collateral, one of the first things I look for are the profiles of the people in the business. Sometimes there may be some brief profiles of a principal or two. Often there is nothing. Instead, content often focusses on recent projects, recent client work, and (invariably) too much general narrative.

Recent project news is vitally important, particularly for businesses associated with the property and construction industry. ‘You’re only as good as your last project’ is a truism. But this ignores the vital role that professional staff have in securing new business opportunities. For a prospective client, it’s not just the most recent series of projects you’ve completed as a business that counts, but also who from your business is going to be working on their job. This applies equally outside the property and construction industry.

I’ve seen this confirmed in several surveys for a variety of different businesses. When clients are asked what influences their choice of professional services firm, it’s invariably the people in that firm; their reputations, skills, and value-adding potential. It is rarely influenced by big brand names. Corporate reputation can rate as modestly important but not as highly as people.

So if people are so important to winning new business opportunities, here are some tips on how to make more of your most important asset in your business development activities:

• Don’t stop at the principals. Your clients know full well that the principals of the business might be the rainmakers but on a daily basis, they’ll be dealing with more junior staff. So you ought to be profiling these staff and their achievements, as much as yours.

• Don’t be fazed by staff changes. ‘But what if people leave?’ is a common objection to profiling more staff. That may have been valid when marketing was totally reliant on expensive paper based documents with long shelf lives, but these days we have digital printing (ideal for short print runs) and web-based content, both of which are quickly and cheaply updated. New staff ought to in itself be an opportunity to communicate with your clients.

• Photographs are important. The human brain is programmed to respond to facial cues. Including written profiles of personnel without their photographs is just making life hard on yourself.

• Informal over formal. My recommendation usually is to try get photos which are more ‘natural’ as opposed to clearly posed corporate headshots in a studio. It just feels more welcoming – I’d rather deal with someone who looks relaxed and at ease as opposed to formal and unapproachable.

• Colour, or black and white? Sure there are circumstances when black and white images add some aesthetic value to a design but in the main, we aren’t all colour blind so my preference is for colour photos over black and white. It’s just how the mind works. (Why is it architects are notorious for creative colourful building designs but prefer their people in black and white?)

• Don’t make them hard to find. A typical fault is to ‘hide’ profiles of your people under some generic heading – particularly so with websites. A tab or page that is easily found and headed simply ‘people’ will do.

• Where to stop? My recommendation is usually to include everyone. That becomes a bit impractical in larger firms but as much as possible, it’s best in my view to include everyone from reception and account staff to directors.

• Don’t overdo the narrative. A profile means outline. It doesn’t mean a life story. While it’s important to profile your people, it’s a deadly sin to provide a full career CV than runs to several pages. 

So if you’re in the business of selling services as opposed to things, maybe you should audit your marketing collateral and content with some of these observations in mind. There is no point in your biggest asset also being your biggest secret.

Lists

Tedious, tiresome, irksome and easy to avoid but utterly essential to maintain and update, your client contact list is a critical piece of marketing infrastructure. Without it, your ability to reach out to clients, prospective clients and target market sectors is handicapped.

One of the constant challenges I see in many businesses is the need to maintain and update the client contact list. Often neglected for months or years at a time, and in some cases not done at all, it’s a simple discipline and one that pays genuine dividends for any business that needs to build new business (and which business doesn’t need new business?).

Whether starting afresh or tackling an existing database, there are a few simple regimes which can give your business an edge when it comes time to reach out to your market with important company news, updates or marketing collateral. There’s no point getting excited about a new piece of collateral – print or electronic – which you’d like to share with prospective clients if you have no way of reaching them. The reality is that this happens often, leading to boxes of un-used brochures or newsletters or email campaigns that fail to reach their targets, simply because you couldn’t find them. So here are some of my suggestions for creating and maintaining an up to date contact list which supports your business marketing ambitions.

Don’t over think it.

Too often, the simple contact list has been over engineered into a fully fledged CRM (customer relationship management) database with multiple fields designed to tell you in great detail more about your clients and prospects, based on their particular interests, where the contact came from, what their last transaction with you was all about, the name of their pets and favourite holiday destinations… you get the picture. And all too often, though it might have seemed like a great idea to capture all this information, this simply makes the task too onerous and hence it doesn’t happen. Further, much of that qualitative information - in my experience - isn’t used. What I suggest is the KISS principle which simply captures their name, surname, position, company address and email address – the essentials for making contact. You could add mobile contacts for SMS campaigns if you plan on doing these are part of your marketing/communication plan. You might add one extra category if the type of contact is important, provided you intend to segregate your marketing. Otherwise, don’t bother.

The annual spring clean

If you have an existing contact list which is used reasonably often, it should be reasonably up to date. Return to senders and bounced email addresses see contacts removed or fresh contact information added. However, it is still worthwhile going through your list, line by line, at least once a year. It will prompt you to remove a few contacts you no longer want, and remind you also of people who should be there, but aren’t. It’s also a good opportunity to remind you about people you haven’t been in personal contact with for some time. It’s especially important to spring clean if you don’t use your list often. Sending material to deceased people is a serious faux pas. And yes, it happens.

The monthly refresh

Every month, your office should be pooling business cards collected during the month and adding these to your contact list. Signature blocks on emails from clients or client prospects also serve the same purpose, and should be copied into your contact database. If this isn’t done regularly, even recent client prospects can miss out on important collateral or news. And it’s these most recent contacts that can sometimes be the most important to maintain communication with. The alternative is to let them forget about you, which surely you don’t want?

Make it someone’s job.

Unless someone in your office takes responsibility for being the list nazi, it’s quite probably going to languish. They only need to take responsibility for collecting new information from others in the office and be prepared to nag to see that it happens. Shared responsibility is fine in theory but in practice, unless someone’s driving it, it won’t happen.

There are a few other tricks about sourcing and expanding contact lists so that your business has the ability to be directly exposed to your target market, but for many businesses, simply observing the disciplines outlined above would be a big step forward. It should be as routine as the end of month accounts. If your business is ignoring this essential piece of business development infrastructure, you aren’t even able to make the most of opportunities when they arise, even if you want to.

More on why it's good to share your IP

The previous article suggested why it can be a good idea to share your IP with clients. Having a reputation for being smarter, faster and better than your rivals can make your phones ring even when markets are quiet. Following some suggestions, I thought I should follow up with a recent example and use it as a case study of how relatively easy it can be and the rewards it can bring to your business.

The little blue book.

I spent just over three years helping to get Cockram Construction established in Queensland. During that time it grew from one (me) to some 30 construction staff and $100million of work.  There were lots of contributing factors and having access to good people and leveraging an excellent reputation elsewhere were certainly instrumental. 

What was also instrumental was targeting a niche and positioning the business as the ‘go to’ people in the space. One illustration of how that was done was what I came to call ‘the little blue book.’

Cockram had some considerable expertise interstate and internationally in the delivery of physical containment laboratories (PC Labs). These are essentially positive or negative pressure sealed labs, used for research (typically) into micro-organisms which can do us a lot of harm. They are very expensive; full of complex services and if they don’t seal or otherwise fail certification, they are useless for their purpose. So having a builder who knows what they’re doing is essential.

Cockram, like many businesses, didn’t spend a lot of time sharing its IP widely. Finding out more about PC Labs wasn’t easy, until I came across a Powerpoint presentation which had been prepared by one of Cockram’s experts for a client briefing.  The beauty of the Powerpoint was that it was very visual and it had pretty much everything there, but expressed in layman terms. Clients could understand it and appreciate that the presenter knew their stuff.

To me, the presentation had all the makings of a showcase publication, designed to share these smarts with a much wider audience. It really wasn’t too difficult to take this presentation and its images and convert it into a small publication – the intellectual content was largely already there. It needed some expansion and editing but observing the KISS principle meant not letting a simple idea turn into an epic.

The ‘Brief guide to PC Labs’ went through a lot of internal review and met with predictable resistance: chief amongst which was a perceived risk that by publishing the insights, Cockram could be giving away its intelligence. But if a company is prepared to share its ideas and insights via Powerpoint presentations, what was the difference between putting it in print? At least, that’s how I argued it… and got away with it.

The first edition was published in 2011 in a small pocketbook format. Hard copies were distributed to likely clients of PC Labs nationwide. Electronic copies were likewise distributed. Feedback was instant, with a number of Cockram’s research clients commending the little blue book. It also made Cockram the ‘expert’ in the eyes of the public sector, who in Queensland knew little of the firm. But next, Cockram were being invited to give presentations to all personnel who may be involved in these types of projects. A group known as TEFMA (Tertiary Education Facilities Managers Association) wanted to circulate a PDF copy to all their members throughout Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific – and their members are the exactly the types of organisations that need to build PC Labs. Copies of the first edition ran out due to demand (how many of you can say that about your standard corporate brochures?) so a second edition was released in 2012.

More than these direct responses, it helped cement Cockram’s reputation for excellence in the field of complex, services-rich construction projects such as PC labs or advanced imaging facilities and hospitals. In Queensland, it catapulted the company’s reputation for specific skills within a clearly defined market in a way that no amount of ‘traditional’ or organic business development strategy could.

There’s just something about releasing a book, however small, that says volumes about your authority and confidence in your subject matter. Releasing the same content in electronic format only just wouldn’t have had the same effect.  This little blue book wasn’t instrumental in helping Cockram grow from a standing start to a $100m per annum business in three years during a downtown, but it certainly helped when it came to the company’s reputation and awareness of its specialist construction abilities.

And so far, not one competitor that I know of has tried to copy the idea.

(You can download a PDF copy of it if you’re interested by clicking this link.)

Share your IP.

Your business IP and the people who it resides with can be your biggest asset in a professional firm. Why then this widespread reluctance to share it with prospective clients?

If you’re in a business which competes on price you can stop reading now. You don’t need a marketing strategy; you need a funeral director because you won’t be around for too long. Price competition makes you just a commodity in the marketplace, and there’ll always be someone just that bit more desperate who will bid things down.

Instead, especially for professional firms, you should be thinking about your point of difference. What makes the service you offer different from your competitors? Why would a client choose you over another? Now I accept that clients determine pricing but let’s say a client had three firms to choose from, and price was equal (ie not an issue). What then?

The next sets of criteria are telling. In my experience, corporate reputation and brand can often be over rated. More often it comes down to the individuals in the business who will be working on the job, and just how much smarter they are seen to be, relative to the competition. This is really what you IP is all about: what makes you different from competitors is how your firm and its people approach jobs; how they’ve solved problems in the past; how they saved time, or money, for clients. And very often, how they’ve helped a client escape a f*ck up, or avoid making one. It’s a technical business term yes, but useful in getting the point across.

So if this is often a strong point of differentiation and a strong selling point for your business, why is it that so many businesses give it so little prominence? Actively promoting the professional staff and the case studies where they have performed exceptionally is the sort of content that is as rare as rocking horse poo (another tech term while I’m on a roll). Instead there’s lot of generic ‘corporate speak 101’ which is about as exciting to read as the back of a cereal packet. It’s of little interest to your potential clients because they’ve heard it all before. They probably have brochures and newsletters of their own, with the same lack of compelling content.

What sorts of things do I have in mind? For starters, are your people prominent in your marketing activity? Are their profiles easy to find on your website? Are their professional profiles and project histories part of your printed collateral? Are there testimonials and referees for how clever they’ve been on past projects? If you’re answering mainly no to these questions, maybe it’s worth thinking about?

Also, is your marketing collateral rich in content about how your people have applied their minds to client problems and found solutions which have worked? Real world case studies or hypothetical scenarios are equally as good, provided they clearly and simply demonstrate to your target audience (being prospective clients) that you and your people know your stuff. The idea here is to position your business outside the commodity market where all competitors are seen alike (and are forced to compete on price) and find some space of your own. This is also how some firms achieve premium pricing over rivals – they are seen to offer more value.

Sharing your IP more openly can only help promote what you offer in the best possible way. It’s been often suggested to me that you shouldn’t give away your IP but I wouldn’t worry, your clients can’t copy it… they need you to apply it to their circumstance. And as for your competitors, you pretty well rely on the fact that most of them will stick with the uninspiring language of ‘corporate speak 101’ and have little to differentiate themselves from others. Except maybe price. Good luck to them.

Phone a friend?

The value of trusted client perspectives on your business can’t be understated and it’s surprisingly easy to do. So why don’t more do so?

I’ve seen many companies, when working on a new business plan or growth strategy, reference nearly all the intellectual content internally. In other words, they trudge off to some retreat destination, lock themselves in a room for a few hours, and hopefully come up with a bunch of ‘new’ ideas for growing their business. Occasionally they might get one of those corporate facilitators to help keep them stay awake during the lock up but too often that sees one person’s views imposed on an all too receptive group, hungry for ‘fresh’ thinking.

But how do you really expect to get fresh thinking when you confine your search for inspiration to the same people you’ve been working with all year, and when you’ve neglected to ask some views of the most important people in your business: your clients.

Given it’s your clients who actually pay the bills, it’s surprising that client surveys aren’t a more routine discipline in business development and growth planning.  They’re the ones who are looking to your business to grow with them, to adapt, to anticipate and innovate. You already have a relationship and a highly inter dependent one, so doesn’t it make sense to place a high value on the perspectives your clients (and potential clients) can bring to you business?

This can take the form of a reasonably detailed anonymous survey. There are some tricks to getting this right (poorly phrased questions will produce poor responses) but the mechanics today are all too easy. You can use a number of online services which allow respondents to submit their replies in a multiple choice format, in complete anonymity. And the programs themselves do the basic data summaries for you. Have a look at one I’ve used with good results: www.surveymonkey.com

If you’re sending your survey to hundreds or even thousands of contacts on your client database, you need to appreciate that the response rate will be quite low. If you get 10% you’re doing incredibly well. Five percent is more like it. But that can still be a reasonable sample and provide you with quality insights into what you’re customers are looking for in your business or when buying the sorts of services you provide.

You can always make it more personal, by directly approach a smaller group of high value clients, asking them to complete the survey for you. That will generate a higher response rate because it’s more personal and relies on the relationship you have with them. The numbers need not be huge in the sample to give you some excellent feedback.

And don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it’s only on the big issues where you could use your client’s feedback. Something relatively straightforward, like a general brochure outlining your businesses’ credentials and what you offer, is also worthy of ‘phoning a friend’ in your clients. Why not ask them what they think of it (as a draft) because they’re in the business of looking from the outside in. They’ll know what makes them tick and what presses their hot buttons, and they’ll probably know that better than you. The smartest marketing executives on your team (if you have them) simply don’t think like your customers, so using your customers as a sort of focus group even on draft marketing collateral just makes sense. 

If you have the relationship, they won’t mind and many will go to substantial effort providing all sorts of detailed feedback. You obviously can’t take it all on board and what works for one customer won’t for another, but in the process you’re better informed and your valued clients  probably feel more valued because you went to the effort to ask them their opinion.

This is such a simple discipline in business marketing and growth planning, that there’s no need to labour the point. The fact that it isn’t done that widely in professional firms and B2B markets is even more reason why you should give it a try, if you aren’t already.

Billboards in the Simpson?

Is your website a thing of beauty but about as useful as an advertising billboard in the Simpson Desert, because no one sees it? And what can you do to try fix that?

Other than cluttering a website with too much tedious information (see last month’s post for some common sins), a lot of businesses breathe a sigh of relief once ‘the new website’ is done, and the project falls off the ‘to do’ list. Too often, once created, it’s left to work on its own, as if by magic attracting potential clients to gaze at its (rapidly dating) content in rapt awe.

But it doesn't work that way. If you haven’t committed to leveraging all that effort you put into creating your site, you will only get a fraction of the benefit you hoped for.

I’m writing this with business to business marketing in mind. If your business relies on marketing to consumers, then different dynamics come into play. To tell the difference, it’s really a question of whether they know who they’re looking for, or more a question of what. That is, if your typical client already knows who you are, they’ll probably Google your business name to check on any latest news on projects or people or simply want a quick way to find your contact details. This is what’s often typical of business to business marketing environments. (Your website can tell you what search words clients are using to find your site… it’s worth checking, it could save you wasting lots of money on SEO if you’re not in that type of space).

By contrast, if your typical customer doesn’t know who you are, and will typically Google something like ‘Brisbane printers’ (for example), then you can’t ignore the importance of SEO (search engine optimisation) or Google Maps to capture a higher share of potential enquiry.

But let’s say you’re a professional firm that markets to other businesses. Your new website probably cost you several thousand dollars and a lot more in time. You owe it to yourself to get the most from it, or why did you bother in the first place?

Driving traffic there.

One way to drive traffic to your site is simply to remind your clients that it’s there. As self-evident as it sounds, it is too often left to be forgotten, other than perhaps a web address at the bottom of your email signature.

Some companies send clients function invitations via email, with a hyperlink back to the website for the actual invitation. That can work nicely if your business holds open invite functions like this. Others use an e-burst advising of a new person appointed to the business, or a new project win, or some other piece of news about the business, but where the recipient needs to follow the hyperlink back to your site for the full story. That also works. (Those who don’t click through really just aren’t that into you, but don’t take it personally).

Another device which can be a good driver of traffic is to use a brief form of survey that invites clients via email or sms to log onto to your site and answer a few key questions. This can be about anything as broad as opinions on the direction of the economy for your market sector in coming months, to testing new products on your clients.

Keep it fresh

If your ‘news’ section is full of content that was last loaded up six months ago, you’re passing your use by date. But if you regularly add new ‘news’ content and regularly let people know when you’ve added something new, then you’re creating the impression of a vibrant, up to date business.

And don’t just rely on new content in the news section. Change the home page images. Add new content or downloads to key sections. Every couple of months, try give your top two or three pages something fresh and new that repeat visitors will realise is something worth exploring. Otherwise, it’s a bit like asking someone to read a short story, over and over again. You wouldn’t, so why ask your clients to?

Keep it simple.

As with most things in life, simplicity is everything. Consultants can sometimes go overboard on creating complexity where simplicity would have done. Your clients are time poor and will value communication that is brief, easy to understand and simple to follow. Strong images are superior to lengthy blocks of text. If showcasing your people, use pictures supported by captions, with a download option if viewers want a more expansive CV. Most probably won’t – they will just use your website to scan quickly the people, projects, products and expertise of your company, and for any latest news. Because they’re mainly scanning, think with that in mind. (It’s been described as designing a billboard for people driving past at 100kpm… the simple message works, but long ones are doomed to fail).

And for goodness’ sake, make it easy to find your address and contact phone and email details. That will be one of the primary reasons people are visiting your site, so don’t make it too obscure.

That’s really all there is to it. It’s up to you and your colleagues to find inventive ways to drive traffic to your website, and to create ways which encourage repeat visits. If you have gone to the effort of building a new site and have basically now abandoned it to hyperspace, you quite possibly wasted your time and money in the first place. 

WWW: What's Wrong with your Website?

Many business people in professional services may have a dark memory about creating their website. It involves spending countless, painful, non-billable hours working with consultants who they didn’t really understand and in the process spending more money than they ever wanted in order to give birth to ‘the new website.’  Since then (if this sounds like you), you’ve possibly tried to erase the memory, happy in the knowledge that ‘we have a new website’ and you’re content in the hope that there’s probably no need to think about it further. If this is you, then you might have a problem but the good news is it’s easy to fix.

Websites were once the domain of tech experts and marketing gurus who spoke an entirely different language to the rest of us. They were expensive and complicated and, once created, were so difficult to update that few bothered.

These days, however, business websites can be created by the layman, and it can all be done for minimal outlay. In fact, if you’re spending more than a few thousand on a website, I’d suggest you might be paying too much, especially if your main audience are other businesses as clients (consumers and shopping basket style websites have different features which are a bit more complex so they will cost a good bit more).  But to keep it low cost and effective, there are some things you need to keep foremost in mind.

The critical thing now, in my view, is that websites for businesses aren’t showcases with high pose value but a utilitarian component of your marketing mix which needs to work efficiently. To do that you need to understand how your clients use it, you should avoid clutter and complexity and you should feature the sorts of things that sets your business apart from others.

The truth is that people (clients are people too) will tend to use your website for just a few fairly simple things. The most common will probably be as a de-facto phone book. The trusty Google search is used to find your business website and through that your phone number or email address. Second, they’ll probably want to know about the people in your business. In professional services, it’s always the people that make the difference.  (I’m always amazed how often companies in this space hide their personnel from view). And third, a bit of a look at some of your recent work will probably satisfy most users that yes, you’re legit and you appear to have the people and track record you claim.

So if you’ve over engineered your website with a host of long narrative which covers everything from your early corporate beginnings to your community activity or long descriptions of your services, all written in that dismal language of corporate speak which sounds so much like everyone else’s, you’ve probably not only wasted your time but are wasting that of your clients. Rather than “You had me at hello” it’s a case of losing them from the start.

One of the first things you should start to do is measure your website performance. Have you even looked? It’s easy through Google analytics or other means to understand how often your site is being visited, how long people are spending looking at it, and what they’re using it for (ie which pages they’re looking at). If you haven’t measured how your site’s performing, I’ll give you my guess, which is that each visitor looks at on average between only 2 and 3 pages, they spend under 3 minutes on your site, and the most popular page is the one with your contact details. If you have pages and pages of content which aren’t even being looked at, think about getting rid of them. It’s cathartic and means you’ll have less content to maintain.

In my view, for most businesses much more than 5 or 10 pages in total and you begin to test the user’s patience. That doesn’t mean you can get away with five main tabs each with multiple pages attached, I’m talking 5 to 10 pages in total.  If your site has more than 10 pages, why not think about how it would work if you simply deleted the 5 least visited pages?

Now, have a look at your content. Look at the pages which are actually being visited. Check the narrative and make sure it’s as minimalist as it can possibly be. Have someone edit it for you if you can, with a brief to make the narrative as short as possible. Don’t be tempted to add but learn the discipline to delete. Less is definitely more. Instead of long narratives, are there visuals like graphs, diagrams or photos that will convey things for you?

And when it comes to content, try this: imagine replacing your company name with a rival’s. If the result sounds very much like what’s on a rival’s website, you’ve fallen into the trap of sounding like everyone else. Tourism marketing is a classic example of this. Words and phrases and even entire paragraphs that are almost entirely transferrable to rival businesses in different locations are a sign that there’s been little genuine effort to write for the reader. Delete it all and start again.

If you are a professional services firm, check how many of your professional staff are highlighted. In my view, websites should be updated as new staff join, existing staff are promoted or when people leave, just as your internal documents are. It should be quick and routine. The people you have are what set your business apart from competitors. Logos mean much less, I’m afraid, so if your focus is all about the ‘corporate look’ and logo land, and ignores or downplays the role of your people, you are making a mistake. And don’t fall for the trap of only highlighting senior staff. On a day to day basis, junior and middle ranking professionals have just as much contact with your clients as you. All you need is a nice photo and brief description. It’s not that hard.

On that score, I can’t say I’m a fan of the ‘corporate photo’ look which is highly staged and formal. Candid business casual is a bit more ‘real.’ And if you have on your website any of those stock corporate photos which pretend that your staff are a mix of Hispanic, Negro, Chinese and white Americans, all holding hands or in some obviously staged corporate scene, please please, please, get rid of them. Try this rule: use no pictures of people who don’t actually work for you. I’d rather see a pic of your pet dog that guards the office door than one of these stock images.

Your recent projects or assignments are also useful to highlight, but the operative word is ‘highlight’. You don’t need to provide volumes of information – a photo, illustration, chart or diagram with a few brief words will do the trick.

Currency is also important. The content should be up to date – not just personnel but all the content. Check to see how long it’s been since you did your own content refresh. If it’s more than 12 months, you’re overdue for a rewrite. There’s nothing worse, for example, than a ‘news’ section where the most recent update is more than a year old. It really looks like you’ve either done nothing in the last year, or have forgotten entirely about what’s on your site.

And finally, the easiest thing to find on your site should be your contact details. The office address, some contact emails, phone numbers etc. Why is it that this basic and most popular content is so often the hardest to find, or isn’t provided at all? If all you have for people to ‘contact us’ is one of those ghastly electronic contact forms and nothing else, I just ask why you even wanted a web presence in the first place? Hiding contact details and forcing people to use one of these contact forms is the web equivalent of a business that only gives out a call centre number with a hold message that says “your call is important to us” when you know damn well it isn’t.

Now, if all this web weight reduction sounds too depressing and you really can’t bear to be so minimalist, you can always provide longer documents via a pdf download. This way, anyone who’s interested in knowing a good deal more detail is catered for. And you can also count the number of people who download those documents, which could be a nice reality check.

Finally, a quick plug for some of the existing on-line web design outfits. I used one called wix.com to build mine – it was easy and low cost and even allowed me a few fancy features. There are others too, and many offer a variety of templates which make the exercise easier still. It’s actually become a relatively easy exercise these days and the only complexity is what you bring to it, so you only have yourself to blame.