Tag Archives: business

Humanitarian Migrants Create Jobs

Humanitarian migrants make a huge contribution to our society and economy. This is unsurprising, when you think about it. Where they come from, they have the ultimate work ethic: everybody has to work or there won’t be any food to eat. It’s really that simple.

Perhaps some see this as a threat, but that would be a very constricted view of the matter. According to the data, many humanitarian migrants are creating their own businesses, and new jobs! I think this is a real asset and adds to our awesome diversity.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/04/refugees-are-australias-most-entrepreneurial-migrants-says-research

Humanitarian migrants make twice as much money from their own businesses as people arriving on skilled and family visas, says statistics bureau.

Refugees are not taking Australian jobs, they are creating new ones, according to new government research that reveals humanitarian arrivals are the country’s most entrepreneurial migrants.

[…] it was migrants who arrived as refugees who reported the highest proportion of their incomes that year “from their own unincorporated businesses”. This income grew with the length of time they spent in Australia, and “increased sharply” after five years of residency.

The report built on earlier research showing humanitarian migrants tended to work several jobs in their first few years in Australia to build capital to start their own businesses, the ABS said.

If you want to create jobs contribute, you get on with it and do so – governments don’t create jobs, people do. The best a government can do is to help create and support an environment in which this works well – generally speaking this is mostly a case of making sure initiatives are not sabotaged through well meaning but faulty legislation. Note though, less legislation and regulations doesn’t necessarily make for a better business environment.

Another obvious take-away from the research: saving up for starting your own business is an excellent way to get going, it’s the Upstarta way. It means you won’t start out with debt or repayment burdens.

(Video: An Asylum Seeker is Someone – Lentz Family, xmas 2013)

Spammer Selling Anti-spam Tools

Today I received an unsolicited email starting

“The email tsunami has swamped everyone, [product name] helps you clear the debris and pinpoint the messages you need.”

Ironic? To say the least. If you’re part of the problem and actively contributing to it, don’t try to sell me a solution. That’s just obnoxious. That company instantly disqualified itself from ever getting any business from me. There are always alternative offerings, so I vote with my feet&wallet.

Outsourcing your Public Presence

Many companies and organisations, large and small, now only interact with people through sites like Facebook and Google+. That is, no longer do they have blogs and other items on their own site that allow comments and other forms of interaction. For example, one of my local radio stations (ABC 612 Brisbane) posts links and items on their Facebook page, and while I can still send them an email, essentially all the interaction with the program makers and other listeners happens in the Facebook threads. I find this a very troubling development.

Let’s look at what the drivers are. Very simply, an external service provides convenience with less internal effort, so it saves money (many companies don’t have any web skills internally at all). Users can share posts easily with their connections, and thus an organisation possibly gets wider exposure. I understand all that, but what are the consequences of this development?

As a sideline – there’s also a perceived advantage for the user, and that is that they’re not handing over their name/email and possibly other information to so many companies – instead it’s concentrated with a few, and that makes users feel more comfortable and in control. Whether they are actually (in control) remains to be seen, as it provides information behemoths like Google and Facebook with even more ways to profile people and tie things together. What are the long-term consequences of that?

While in the case of Google+ you can get your data out, that only applies to a fairly limited recent range of time. Last time I tried, I could only export my items from the last 60 days or so. Posts prior to that were actually completely gone. Not the kind of public record a company looks for, is it? Historical threads can be quite important, particularly when people search for topics that you’ve been involved with. Even a long time later, such links provide an important source of traffic and potential business, and also support the ongoing public image. Facebook basically just owns your data, but at least it doesn’t have a limited lifetime. That is, as long as that’s what Facebook decides to do with it. Either way, you’ve handed over a lot of control, in return for some convenience, but definitely with negative consequences for you and those add up over time, even if the provider does not disappear or decides to do things with your data that are not to your benefit.

Are there alternatives? Disqus appears to be doing well. It takes care of the registration/login tasks and handles the comment process for posts, but it integrates with an existing website or blog system. I do like this approach better as it doesn’t shift your existence (in terms of the URL where users go) to an external site, but nevertheless there’s still a risk, the provider can go away at some point. Where is your data (user contacts, comment threads), can you still access it, can you get it out, and then can you do something sensible with it to not loose this rather valuable historical asset?

While pondering this article I thought of Greg Gianforte, founder of RightNow technologies and author of the book “Bootstrapping Your Business” which Upstarta gladly recommends as many of the concepts are closely aligned. I’ve met Greg when I organised a conference in the US, his story is pretty interesting. He bootstrapped RightNow in 1997 and the company went public in 2004. What RightNow has been doing was quite pioneering, they allowed companies to outsource much of their customer interaction (support tracking system, online helpdesk, feedback forms, etc) while keeping the original branding. So it was a hosted, branded, service. As you can see, Disqus is doing something similar, but just for comments. While not many of the public would have heard about RightNow, they did really well and helped many companies deliver customer service – a typical business-to-business service. We’re not talking small fry, by the way: huge multinationals such as Proctor&Gamble use them. Their current range of services is extensive, so you can just imagine how they can really enable companies, but… at the same time really tie them to this service.

Late 2011 the company was acquired by Oracle Corp. What will happen now? Oracle has bought out many other players in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relations Management (CRM) sphere. Typically the clients get absorbed, and the original products disappear. Naturally the exact flow differs per company and product/service. However this ends up though, will it be good for the clients? I doubt it. They had a service they liked, and now they’re going to have to adapt to a new environment, or leave.  Do they even have that freedom? Imagine the huge cost of migrating to another provider (with similar risks) or taking the services in-house. But who pays for the changes if they stay? Business processes would need to change either way. I realise it is a very rough picture that I’m drawing, but the crux is this: these businesses are now highly dependent on the external service, so the extent that they get high costs forced upon them in order to survive – and if they can’t afford it, bye-bye company.

This flow of events is entirely typical, companies make business decisions that are entirely valid at the time. They outsource tasks that are not part of their “core competencies”. Even looking towards their future, with some attention to the possible risks, the decisions appear to make sense at the time. Yet the companies get bitten later, so something  has happened and that is the kind of thing that Upstarta loves to investigate. Were the choices correct, were the risks fully understood, and the consequences considered? It keeps happening to big seemingly smart companies, in different contexts (Dell computers getting slowly eaten by AsusTek: first they produced some components for Dell, then mainboards, then complete systems. And then it went directly to market with its wares, bypassing Dell).

In case of Dell/AsusTek it’s a typical example of disruptive business, but it’s interesting as well as disconcerting to observe this in the context of these critical services such as a company’s interaction with its own clients. Is that, perhaps, too much risk to take?

Clean Energy legislation in Australia

Today the Australian Clean Energy legislation package passed the senate. What it does is change the tax system (in line with the Henry tax review recommendations) so that companies/products using non-renewable energy sources see higher costs – this works through to citizens of course, and the other end of the change is compensation measures for them (such as a much higher tax free threshold) as well as initiatives for wider deployment of renewable energy sources. In focus it’s fairly similar to what’s been happening in Europe over decades, moving away from taxing income towards taxing consumption. So in a nutshell, if a consumer picks cleaner alternatives, they’ll be much better off than before.

The opposition is still harping on about it, including vows to repeal it (even though they’ve quietly already conceded that a number of related laws would stay – so if they were to repeal, they’d have a budget hole). I find that vow more of a threat, and very problematic. What business tends to like more than anything is certainty about the environment they have to operate in. Stability. So whether they liked the new laws or not, having them now is a clear state and they can work with it – the laws also create new opportunities for existing as well as potential businesses, and there too having the certainty is very important.

As an entrepreneur myself, I don’t want bet my business initiatives on having a low energy price – since regardless of the above mentioned legislation, the price of energy is going to keep going up, and likely quite significantly. I could, as others have done, go out lobbying for lower prices – but I see that as a less efficient way to spend my time.

Instead I aim to make sure that any business model preferably works independently of things like energy price, but at least works out even with a much higher price. I believe that’s the sensible way to go about it. I set up Open Query before the GFC, and because of its Upstarta way of operating it was in much better shape when other companies and independent consultants ran in to trouble. So the concept has been proven in that respect also.

On a psychological level, I reckon it must be hard to on the one hand oppose something and on the other hand build your business to deal with what you oppose. It’s a conflict that will compete for your time and attention, and from my observations the opposition work tends to win and the business work loses – then particularly if the opposition fails (which is always a real possibility) the business is in a much worse position than if it had focused on dealing with the issues. Somehow the chance of a favourable outcome is grossly misjudged and/or the cost of the business change is over-estimated. Either way, that strategy is damaging. Think carefully before you go such a route.

What do you deal with external change (such as govt legislation) in your business environment, what are your strategies?