On February 15th I started a new blog that gives me an outlet for my passion, teaching. The new blog at JoeyBrannon.com breaks down financial topics and explains why they are relevant to a CEO or business owner's understanding of the organization. I have been having a lot of fun with it. Please take a look and offer your comments.

The February newsletter went out earlier this week. This month we covered the topic of sales drivers, commonly referred to as marketing. There is a lot you can do with marketing, especially if you follow the school of "test and measure." But in this newsletter I just cover the basics. They are:

1. Identify your customer. You must be able to describe the type of person/decision maker/company you are looking for vividly.
2. Locate your customer. Where do they spend time. What are they doing when they are there. To sell to them you must be able to track them down so you can get their attention.
3. Deliver a compelling message. Once you know who they are and where they are you need to know what to say to motivate them to action.

You can read an archived copy of the newsletter here.

When dealing with startups and growing businesses there is no more popular technology topic than cloud computing. At the forefront of this new world are services like Google Apps, Basecamp, SalesForce and Dropbox. For business owners the idea of zero infrastructure cost, no hardware failures or software updates is very, very, very attractive. I know. As a small business owner I've spent more time in the server room than I should. After a lot of research and four years of hosting our own Exchange Server I switched our email over to Google Apps at the end of last year and we are enjoying several benefits.

1. Email search has never been this easy or this fast. Using Microsoft's desktop search in Outlook was a painful, painful process. 
2. Gmail's threaded conversation view cuts down on inbox clutter.
3. Gmail's keyboard shortcuts make processing the inbox much faster when you receive 100-200 emails per day.
4. Massive amounts of storage mean we don't worry about bloated backups or full inboxes.
5. When out of the office we get the same exact email experience as we do in the office. No VPN's or Outlook Remote Web Workplace to worry about.
6. Spam protection that seems to work better than our old add-on service.
7. Did I mention it's free? Well sort of. Advertisers are paying for it, but the ads are unobtrusive and if we really get tired of them we can pay to have them removed (and get more storage as well).

There are some drawbacks. Gmail does not integrate with Microsoft Office, Quickbooks and some other programs the way Exchange/Outlook does so emailing attachements requires a couple of more steps at times. And then there is this gaping hole in the Google Apps product suite. THERE ARE NO SHARED CONTACTS. I just cannot get over this. When we are using Google Docs we can opt to share a document with everyone in the domain. We can share calendars with everyone in the domain. We can even create websites that we can share with the domain or with outsiders (Microsoft was on the verge of something great here with Sharepoint but for some reason they thought no one outside of the domain would need access to the site). But we can't share a simple contact list?

This is a huge problem because for our office it is the one feature that keeps us anchored to an Exchange Public Folder. What is even more surprising is that no-one has stepped into this space to fill the void. We could spend a fortune ($65/month/user) for SalesForce or we could pay a fraction of that for Zoho CRM. But these are full blown CRM systems and we don't need that. Further, their email interfaces are clunky at best (SalesForce) and downright destructive at worst (Zoho). Zoho Business could be a competitor to Google Apps except for the lackluster email experience.

Google Apps users have been begging for shared contacts in forums and feature request boards for over two years, and this seems like such a simple thing for Google to implement. Their goal is to index all of the world's information, but they can't let me share our company's contacts with the five other users on our domain? I just don't get it. Someone help me. Why go to the trouble of branding Google Apps as an organizational platform and leave out something as simple as shared contacts? 

Stefan Sagmeister is a very talented designer running a high profile design firm in New York. There is nothing very remarkable about that. But Stefan also closes his firm for an ENTIRE YEAR every seven years. What is interesting is that Stefan's sabbatical started out as a way to enjoy a glimpse of retirement earlier in life. What he found out was that the sabbatical was essential to rejuvenating and re-energizing the creative capacity upon which his firm's success was founded.

Watch Stefan's TED talk below and ask yourself what you need to do to generate the "sabbatical effect" in your business.

If you did not receive our email newsletter today here is a taste of what you're missing.

• How to get the most out of a tax season visit with your CPA.
• Things you can do to give yourself a better chance of keeping those New Year's resolutions.
• Hot topics and things to watch out for in 2010.
• A run down of some of my personal and business resolutions for this year.

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