Today’s blog article is being posted a little later in the day than usual because I wanted to specifically recount part of my day:  I spoke at a local networking group.  I think this is worth discussing today for a four main reasons.

First, the web will never, ever, ever entirely replace face-to-face interaction.
I am as close to being ‘a digital native’ is as possible for someone born prior to the Reagan Administration.  I may not be part of Gen Y, but many of my digital habits are pretty close.  I love the online space.  Not only have I made a career out of it, but it drives much of my social life and was, in point of fact, also how I met my husband.  Online is my native space.

However, no matter how much I prefer email to the phone, or RSS to hardcopy newspapers, or Hulu to cable TV, when it comes down to it, people are human beings first and foremost and human beings are social creatures.  Even introverts need social interaction to stimulate aspects of your brain that electronic interaction doesn’t access in the same way.  And no matter how great a social media marketing strategy you have, no amount of online reputation management and relationship building can ever replace the value of meeting someone face-to-face and being able to size them up in person.

Today’s speaking engagement was a great reminder of that, because I met people who ran all kinds of different businesses in all types of different arenas, with all types of different customers.  It was a far more expansive array of people than I normally meet on a daily basis, and with it came questions that I don’t typically answer, and perspectives that I do not typically consider.  And it gave people who don’t normally deal with people like me the chance to ask questions that matter to them, and size me up to see if I had the potential to be valuable to their business.

Second, everyone is an expert in something of value to others.
Hopefully, your business is in at least one of your areas of expertise.  Mine is.  After having been online for more than 16 years, I know what it is to build businesses using the internet.  Even more importantly, I know how to recognize the difference between what worked five years ago and what works today — and why they are not the same.

Chances are that you are an expert in something that other people find of value.  Chances are even better that you haven’t met every single person who could use your products and services (if you have, then your long-term business strategy is in trouble).  So going out and participating in local events where you can meet other people is one of the fundamentals to drumming up more business.

Third, interaction sparks creativity and ingenuity.
When I work with developers who are building tech startups, I can almost always predict the issues, challenges, opportunities and questions that are native to the project.  When I work with catalogers and retailers building an ecommerce site, again, I can predict the issues.  What I love about small business-centric networking is that I get curve balls all the time.

Most creative ideas are a result of trying to find a solution to a problem.  So those of us who are “experts” have a lot of practice answering a specific set of questions that pertain to a (usually) narrow set of problems particular to a specific niche.  If you want to broaden your horizons, though, go into a room full of entrepreneurs from all different markets, in all different types of businesses.  It’ll take ten minutes before you get questions from people whose perspectives you’ve never previously considered.

And the best way for you to get better at what you do, is to start thinking about new ways to solve problems for people.  Leverage your experience in one niche and see how you can apply some of it to someone else in a different niche.  Often times it’s surprising what things translate to a new space and what things don’t.  In either case, though, you’ve learned something new and started increasing your own value by starting to learn about a new market.

Last, all money is local money.
Penelope Trunk used this line when speaking on a panel this past March at Austin’s SXSW Interactive Conference.  While she was specifically referring to venture funding for startups, this also applies at a personal level.

In a virtual, ecommerce-enabled age, it’s easy to default to the idea that working virtually is great and that you don’t need to work face-to-face with someone in order to provide value.  And that’s all true.  However, all things being equal, money is spent locally first.  In an overly dehumanized world, you can never underestimate the preference of people to do business with someone they can sit down and talk to face-to-face over someone they only get to interact with virtually.

So my year-end challenge to all entrepreneurs:

1. Identify at least three local networking groups
2. Before the end of Q1 2010, attend at least one event of each
3. Pick at least one of the groups to officially join
4. Volunteer to actively manage or officially get involved in some capacity
5. Log any business-related value that comes from it, including soft-skills that you develop as a result

Not sure where to start?  The best three places I would recommend are Meetup.com, LinkedIn and your local Chamber of Commerce.

And remember, holiday parties are a great chance to interact with people you don’t see every day.  So if you’re not sure where to find the best networking groups, start small: ask at least one person at each holiday event you attend if they know of any networking groups they’d recommend, or can direct you to someone who does know.  And then follow-up.  Before long, I promise you that you’ll have at least 3 on your list before the year ends.

Where else do you recommend looking to find networking opportunities for entrepreneurs?

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

In last week’s post, we described the process of defining your top three objectives for next year. The reason, you may recall, that we limited your list to only three goals is simple: you don’t have the luxury of a single priority, but also can’t afford to try to do too many things. With your list of the right three goals, your business will improve and you’ll have the time and budget to attack your next set of priorities.

Here’s how you finish your plan.
Remember that you can’t DO a goal. What you CAN do, however, is properly execute a series of activities, each with the necessary level of quality, which combine to deliver your objective.

For example, you can’t just “win” a football game. What you can do is create and manage a list of appropriate activities: field a team of players. By position, teach them plays and how to make touchdowns. Make sure they’re in uniform and on the field at the right time on game day. If they execute according to your direction and score more points than your opponent, you will win the game.

So, for your game-plan/business plan, examine your top three objectives. For each of them, jot down the list of activities you need to accomplish them. Sequence the activities, and then make a note on your calendar of when each activity needs to be done, because you need to have a way to monitor or measure your progress.

That’s all there is to it! Shift your focus to doing each of the activities to the best of your ability, and get each activity done on or before the due date. If you included all the correct activities on your calendar, you should accomplish each objective. It works!

One of my favorite parts of the end of any year are the ‘year in review’ and/or ‘next year’s prediction’ lists.  And when it’s a year that ends in a “0,” the lists are usually longer, more interesting and cover a longer window.  So, too, already with this year.  As we head into 2010, we are already starting to see the ‘decade in review’ lists.  My favorite one so far, is Inc.’s Entrepreneur of the Decade list.

Of course, part of the reason that I find this decade’s list so interesting is because almost every company listed has touched my life — some more directly than others.  And, quite rightly, most of the entrepreneur’s Inc. calls out have created brands whose influence has become deeply baked into our culture in ways we never would have predicted in 2000, but which we take for granted today.

1. Steve Jobs of Apple
2. Jeff Bezos of Amazon
3. Jack Ma of Alibaba.com
4. Martha Stewart
5. John Mackey of Whole Foods
6. Leslie Blodgett of Bare Escentuals
7. Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com
8. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
9. Tony Hsieh of Zappos
10. Peter Theil of PayPal
11. Reed Hastings of Netflix
12. David Neeleman of JetBlue
13. Nick Denton of Gawker Media
14. Stefan Persson of H&M
15. Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter
16. Nandan Nilekani of Infosys Technologies
17. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google

Aside from some of the more obvious companies that made this list — e.g. PayPal, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — part of what I love about this list are the non-tech companies that make an appearance: Whole Foods, Bare Escentuals, JetBlue and H&M.

Coming from a tech-centric background, it’s often easy to forget that “innovation” is not synonomous with “technology.”  I think this is something that is often forgotten, particularly when it comes to startups.  The focus is often put on technology, instead of on creating innovative solutions.

Zappos and Netflix are two of my favorite examples, because they are often lumped into the category of “tech companies,” yet in reality, their true market differentiator has almost nothing to do with the actual technology itself.  The technology they use — in both cases ecommerce, and in Netflix case especially, a super-heavy dose of social commerce — is a means to an end, but their real innovation is around service.  Because, let’s face it, there is nothing about either of their core business that is new: Zappos sells apparel items and Netflix rents movies.

Yet in a world where apparel distributors are operating on razor-thin margins while eating enormous costs in real estate and related overhead, Zappos stands out as a customer service example to etailers everywhere.  And while Blockbuster is closing down stores by the hundreds and the movie studios scream about online piracy problems, Netflix continues to demonstrate that there really is money to be made in renting movies. (And we will skip the extent to which both companies continue to be examples of great business cultures with enviable employee engagement levels.)

The greatest thing about this list, though, is how much of it represents massive change to the small business arena itself.  Apple, Amazon, Salesforce, PayPal, Twitter and Google have all been phenomenally disruptive influences that have helped set the stage for the new era of small business opportunity.  Whether they all started out with that intent or not, each of them has helped build a new set of business models and standards that foster more opportunities for small business success.

At what prior point in history would a list like this have included so many amazing influences that have helped entrepreneurs have access to more tools and services, and help make them more successful?  None, really.  So the real reason I love this list is because it continues to show that, even the biggest success stories we can find, are successful because, in large part, they are continuing to fan the flames of entrepreneurship far beyond their own front doors.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

We are excited to announce that we have added a new feature to WorkingPoint that can help you get paid faster by making it easier for customers to pay you with PayPal.

After a quick set up to establish a connection between WorkingPoint and your PayPal account, you can send your customer a PayPal link on their invoice. When a customer clicks the link, they will be directed to PayPal to make their payment and WorkingPoint records the invoice payment in your WorkingPoint account for you, saving you time and reducing data entry errors.

Check out the following videos to see how easy it is to set up and collect invoice payments with PayPal.

Setting up PayPal in WorkingPoint from Workingpoint on Vimeo.

I have a friend who, until a year ago, was living in a small Appalachian town.  She had hoped to open a small cafe, in response to the lack of social venues in the rural community.  Unfortunately, the former mining town has not been able to find a new source of economic stability, and so she changed her plans and moved to Texas where she felt sure she could find more opportunities to start and grow a successful business.

One of the most compelling stories she tells of her time in the small town, though, was about a town council meeting in which the topic of conversation was limited to “how to bring mining and manufacturing back” to their community.

When I see the list of companies the White House had on hand to discuss job growth last week, my friend’s story is what I think of.  It’s like watching Rupert Murdoch claim that the solution to the newspaper industry’s woes is simply to cut Google out of the loop.  It is stubborn Industrial Age thinking that flies in the face of everything we know to be true in the Information Age.

Amy M. Wilkinson, a Senior Fellow at Harvard University Center for Business and Government and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, wrote an exceptional op-ed for CNN on Friday that eloquently makes the point:  it is not big business that is going to be our future economic recovery, it is entrepreneurs.

There is a common warning that financial experts will give small businesses: do not ever let too much of your revenue be tied to a single client.  Of course, the danger in that is obvious: if something causes that client to disappear, then your business is devastated.  The more subtle danger, though, is that if a single client is responsible for too much of your survival, then the distribution of power is entirely in their favor.  They say, “Jump!” and you are stuck asking, “How high?”

For a century this is how the economy has functioned: large industries said “Jump!” and policy makers had to ask, “How high?”  Last week’s White House summit was an homage to days gone by, and yet no one seemed to recognize it.  Once again, we all fell into our old habits and assumed that big industry’s leaders were the people who should be in the room, who should be helping to shape policy, who should be the best informed about what works and what does.

And yet they aren’t.  Big business is not the future.  Nobel Prize winning economist, Ronald Coase, posited that the size of the firm is dictated by the cost of information.  Everything we have witnessed over the past two decades has continued to confirm the economic implications of that theorem: in a world of affordable communication vehicles, a firm no longer needs to be large to be impactful.  And the more mobile and electronically-based we get, the less relevant a traditional firm model becomes.

Despite the fact that we see this daily with the success of firms on the cutting edge of the information economy — large ones like Google, Amazon and Salesforce, as well as smaller ones, like WorkingPoint, Zoho and SocialText — culturally we continue to cling to the realities of last century when it is time to fix things.  We are like grownups who write Christmas Wish Lists to send to Santa, even though we know better.

Economic recovery isn’t something that Santa Claus is going to leave in our collective national stocking or under our tree.  We need to stop relying on the tactics that worked 30 years ago, and start recognizing that in an information economy, it is not the AFL-CIO or General Motors that is going to pull us up by our bootstraps.  It’s the mom-and-pop dry cleaner and the tech startup that begins in someone’s spare bedroom.  We need economic policies that recognize that reality, and to stop deluding ourselves that “too big to fail” is anything but an outdated failure.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

These days it seems like all the mail anybody’s getting is either credit card offers you don’t need or bills you don’t want. While you can often opt-out of receiving unsolicited mail, you’re pretty much stuck with paying your bills. While it’s no fun paying bills, it’s important to track what you’re spending your money on and how much you’re spending so you can make good decisions on how you use your money, like when to cut-back and when to move forward.

At WorkingPoint we want to do everything we can to make tracking your spending as easy and effective as possible.  You can help us with that by answering the following poll question:

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Jo Woolery at Ankeny Temporary Services:

Providing customized staffing solutions for area businesses and employees.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Heather Haux at East End Tutor:

East End Tutor is comprised of a team of New York State certified educators covering the entire range of content areas; from the humanities to health and wellness.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

For some families, business is just part of the package.  As someone who grew up in a family-owned business, one of the reasons I ducked-and-weaved every time my husband used to bring up the idea of us owning our own business was because I saw a lot of headache (and heartache) as a result of mixing business and family.

Eventually I stopped fighting the inevitable, but I remain constantly aware of the fact that my husband and I have two very different relationships: one as spouses and one as business partners.  And there is no way to avoid the fact that there are times when the needs of one relationship create tension in the other.

A recent post on Forbes, When Siblings Don’t Pull Their Weight by Gene Marks, showcases an example of how one family business found a resolution to some of these challenges: a set of three siblings bought the family business from their parents, and eventually ran into a problem because one of them wasn’t pulling their weight.

The solution Gene discusses is rather clever, but it’s a long-term solution.  In my experience working with family-owned businesses, there are two common challenges that surface in situations like this:

Avoidance. This was, predictably, part of the pattern Gene discussed in his sibling example: the problem festered for quite a while before a solution was found, because no one wanted to rock the boat.  Everyone was afraid of upsetting their parents and generally causing family strife, so the two siblings who were carrying the heaviest burden of the business avoided saying anything for as long as they could stand.

Urgency. Often this becomes an issue because of avoidance — though it can also be a matter of size.  The longer you avoid a problem, the more likely it is that it will get worse until you have no choice but to deal with it.  And usually, by the time that happens, you’ve got a much bigger mess on your hands than you would have had if you’d handled it sooner.

Small businesses in particular are often cursed with tight enough living conditions that too big a crisis can quickly sink the entire ship.  One of my clients owns a business with his wife, and after a few years of growing it, they decided to bring her daughter in to help run the daily logistics.  The idea made sense for all concerned, and so they got started.

Unfortunately, over time, the daughter’s idea of “a full work day” did not jibe with her step-father’s.  Since the point of bringing her on-board was to off-load as much of the burden from the parent’s as possible, the fact that they were shelling out an enormous percentage of their revenue to pay her salary while not seeing any real reduction in the number of hours they were putting in started causing a problem.

It didn’t take long for my client to get very frustrated: his wife was responsible for managing her daughter, but she didn’t want to be the bad guy.  Unfortunately, she didn’t want her husband to do it, either.  Relationships all the way around quickly grew strained, until the point that family events were palably uncomfortable for everyone.  The situation went on for more than two years before outside circumstances intervened, and the daughter left the business of her own accord.

Now, while they still maintain the same workload as they always have, their financial burden has dropped by more than 20% since they no longer have to pay her salary.  In a small family business with extremely narrow operating margins, that 20% has been a huge relief.  But the real problem was avoided, instead of resolved.

Working with family presents a set of challenges over-and-above the normal assortment that comes standard in most small businesses.  Earlier this year at Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, I asked Wine Library‘s Gary Vaynerchuck about his experience joining (and ultimately taking over) his family’s business.  My specific question was how they all got through it without hurting each other’s feelings.

His answer, of course, was that they didn’t.  He said they constantly hurt each other’s feeling in the beginning, and it took a long time to make work.  But the important thing was always to remember that, no matter how hard it was to integrate their different styles into a rational working relationship, they were family and they loved each other.  They wanted to work together, so they just kept trying until they got it to work.

The answer is different for every family.  Some businesses are too delicate to withstand the turmoil that comes with family strife; other businesses may be too delicate to withstand replacing a family member.  The only real key is to find a way to be honest and don’t fall into the avoidance trap.  It’s possible to be honest about difficult issues and still be kind.  But the longer you let something fester, the harder that becomes.

The old saying, “Bad news doesn’t get better with age” holds true here: if you keep something bottled up, eventually you’ll explode.  It’s bad enough to have a fight with someone you love.  But the last thing you want is to wait until it’s so bad that your business can’t bounce back.

So remember, bite the bullet, be honest and remember that they are your family.  Working together may not be the solution you had originally hoped for, but I guarantee, your holiday dinners will be much better if you don’t have to rely on the lawyers to intervene when it’s time to pass the cranberry sauce.

Alora Chistiakoff is an entrepreneur, content strategist and project manager who has been developing online business and technology for startups for more than a decade.  She co-owns The Indigo Heron Group, Inc., a content strategy firm in Austin, Texas.

In recent postings by our Marketing Guy and Entrepreneur Evangelist, the importance of being found online has been made clear. And a WorkingPoint Online Company Profile is a great (and free!) way of establishing a web presence and getting your company found online.

It’s also a great way to keep your customers and the Internet updated with the latest news and happenings from your company by sharing your “company status”. Like Facebook, your company “status” displays on your Company Profile front and center, just below your company name – this is a great place to let your visitors know about special holiday promotions.