I know I know, everyone’s tweeting these days. Trust me I have had an account for a long time I just have not promoted it one bit. I do tweet from time to time with interesting stories and situations. So if you are interested, please follow me http://www.twitter.com/jaredreitzin

Busy this weekend? If you have some time, tune in Saturday September 26, 2009 at 2pm PST to hear me talk with Jeremy Anticouni about mobileStorm Go and learn ways to optimize the performance of your e-mail and sms marketing campaigns. Simply log on to www.technewsla.com and register for my guest appearance on Jeremy’s Desktop.

Jeremy’s Desktop is the online edition of Tech News, powered by Make It Work, which airs on KNX 1070 NEWSRADIO every Saturday 1pm – 2pm Pacific. It is hosted by Jeremy Anticouni, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Make It Work, Inc., and renowned radio talent, Tim Conway, Jr.

Last night we quietly launched the new www.mobilestorm.com. It was an incredible project that took months of work (read about some of this process here). We started planning in January how to position our offering. What came out of that was two products, mobileStorm Go for companies who want to move fast and save money and mobileStorm Pro for companies who need to save time, strengthen their brand and quantify their return on investment.

We not only created two new product offerings but launched a new website that reflects our changing brand, and a new sign up process that is optimized to get people into a free trial or to create an account as quickly as possible. We rewrote almost every single line of copy on our site and redesigned our popular Digital Marketing Blog.

We also decided to start offering free phone support, and also include dedicated account management with every Pro account. I am not going into too much detail right now, but we completely transformed the company in less than 6 months (more to come on this in future posts). The team really hit it out of the park on this project, working till 3 or 4 in the morning the last two months in a row.

I hope you take some time to check out what we can do to help grow your business. After 10 years in business I believe we have learned a thing or two, but go ahead find out for yourself.

www.mobilestorm.com

Each company has a culture, whether it’s old school thinking shrouded by huge mahogany desks or the quick and nimble start up who plays Halo at lunch. The good and the bad, the right and wrong, all companies think and act in their own way, and each company has its own unique culture. Some companies choose to be transparent in who they are, while others try and hide so as not to offend potential clients, partners or the press. Since the rise of the information age it is getting harder and harder to hide who you are. Google is everyone’s home page and your reputation is only a search away. A lot of companies have decided to stop hiding and allow who they really are to shine thru everything they do, this term is called cultural transparency.

I must admit, mobileStorm has made a few mistakes with not showing our true selves (more on that later). We have a pretty neat culture. I founded the company hiring friends and family, so we have always had a culture of love, fighting, and joking around. No different than how you are with your siblings. It is a very light-hearted and flexible environment, where we are constantly pushing the limits with political correctness. Most of us grew up getting into the same amount of trouble. We didn’t worry about what our friends thought of us and we certainly didn’t worry about offending anyone. Life is about having fun and pushing the limits, so why should your organization be any different?

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It’s been 4 years since we launched the current version of mobilestorm.com. We are coming out with two new products very soon, so it only seemed fit to create a new website that was more in line with our brand, the new products and who we are today. We wanted to build a great looking site that simplified our pitch, most importantly we wanted to spend as little as possible yet make it look like a million bucks. When building a website you have two major focuses, design and development.

Design:

The design of our current website was outsourced to a top notch firm but they were expensive. This time around we decided to hire a few individual designers (with a budget of $2,000 per designer), give them a framework for what we wanted, and like an open source project, make our design more collaborative. We ended up doing the final design in-house, taking bits and pieces from all of our designs mock-ups and creating one great final design. Instead of relying on one firm to do the design and spending a large sum of money we tapped into the power of multiple designers. There are great sites out there like elance.com where you can easily hire people on the cheap.

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Staying inspired over a long period of time is not the easiest thing for an entrepreneur to do. Take this blog for instance. I love sharing my thoughts, ideas, and experience, but it’s not always easy to pick up the laptop and bang out an article. Actually, it can be downright difficult, which is why most blogs have a short shelf life and probably why Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds. If you want to become successful, you need to stay the course. To stay the course, you need to constantly stay inspired, even if it is only a quick burst to get you through the next task. The following five things (in no particular order), inspire and fire me up:

1. Listening to good music: This might seem like an obvious one, but that’s because it is. Not only is it obvious, but music is incredibly powerful. It has made people kill before, and fall in love, and with some songs, both at the same time. So why couldn’t music help get your creative juices flowing? When you have some free time, put together three playlists for three different moods (amped, mellow, and bored) of songs that just rock your world. As I write this, I am listening to Daft Punk’s “Harder, Faster, Stronger.” The next track coming up is “Sea Legs” by the Shins. This article flows quickly and words come easily.

2. Reading: There is nothing like reading a good article to help put things in perspective. While I love reading great books, l look for the quick inspiration in a magazine article. Nothing should fire you up more as an entrepreneur than reading about an amazing success story. Recently, I picked up the latest issue of Inc. and read an article about the founder and CEO of Zappos.com. I had recently been on this kick of how to continue to improve the mobileStorm culture and after reading about what Tony Hsieh did with his company, it truly inspired me to approach culture from a different angle. I like to keep articles like this around that I can quickly access when I need a jump start. Bookmark a bunch of great articles and store them in a folder called “clear!”.

3. Checking out the competition: If this doesn’t light a fire under your ass, nothing will. Don’t just check out any competitor–study the one you admire the most. There is a company in my space (I won’t mention any names) who just gets it. They have made their service incredibly easy to use and understand. They also have a ton of resources and articles for the small business owner. I always seem to work really hard two minutes after leaving their site.

4. Calling friends or family: I hope everyone has a family member or a friend he can lean on. Having a good conversation with someone who believes in you can really lift your spirits, especially when it is coming from someone you admire. I am blessed with a number of high-profile businessmen who are sincere about my success, and a wife who always knows how to make me feel special.

5. Thinking about a future product: I love imagining what my new website will look like, or how our next version of software will function. Your imagination can run so wild, it would give your product manager a heart attack. The best part about daydreaming is that there are no boundaries. I love to start thinking about features that are not possible to develop anytime soon. I think about how they would work and how many big deals I could close as a result. It definitely gets the juices flowing and fires me up for the future.

I know I am over due on a blog post, sorry everyone. I just wanted to talk about something real quick that really pisses me off. Imagine for just a second as a entrepreneur your business was failing because of bad decisions you made. You are about to get bankrupt but at the last minute your mom, dad, brother, uncle and grandpa come in and hand you a million dollars to keep the business alive. As investors they get access to your financial. You report your numbers two months after they give you money and there is a new line item on your P&L statement called “Executive Bonus”. In this column shows a $100,00 bonus paid to you. You have a family function that night and you roll up in a brand new BMW. Think for one second how upset your family would be.

You would have to be a complete narcissist to conscientiously accept that money, hand yourself over a 10% bonus, and then have the audacity to show up in a new car.

Well folks this is exactly what happened with AIG and you are the family who bailed out your relative.  Like a cold hearted killer, they callously took the money with no regard to your feelings or thoughts.

Granted I am few days late on this post (recently a lot of the major execs gave back $50 million) but

a.) Would they have done this if we didn’t call them out on it?
b.) Who are the jerks who have not returned anything?

I am sorry but you do not get a reward in life when you fail. This turns Darwin’s survival of the fittest upside down huh?

Organization visibility is a big goal of mine for next year. This is not a new concept and it certainly is not my idea. I believe when things are going great companies tend to keep their employees less accountable.

Today, “we the people”, received notice that we are in an official recession. Like “we” didn’t realize that. I believe now more than ever employees need to be working at 100% capacity and everything they do should be tracked and accounted for. There is no room for redundancies or employees not willing give you their all. I have never received so many job applications in my 9 years of running mobileStorm than I have in the last two months. What does this mean? Well it means there is a lot of talent out there and people who really want to work. To ensure everyone is kicking ass, you need visibility. This can be achieved through KPI reports.

I am currently working with all my managers and employees to create KPI reports, or Key Performance Indicators. We keep things simple and track everything in excel. This report should be collaborative and agreed upon by your employee and you. What you want out of this report is tracking on all your employees key activities on a weekly basis. You should also set monthly quotas or goals. You want to be able to track how much activity is happening, while also tracking if goals are met. For example the head of my Client Services division has a KPI report that consists of “# of support issues”, and “how people are contacting us (i.e. phones, email, chat etc..)”. Not only do I want to track all of the activity but I want to see this on a week-by-week basis, so I can see any potential trends. Why did we get an abnormal spike in phone calls last week? Did we have system issues? Should we try and push people more to email and chat since phone support costs more money? Also one of the goals might be to reduce the time to chat from 10 minutes to 5 minutes. Did he make this goal? If not, why? These are just a few reports (or lines) on the KPI report but you can see how important it is to track everything and show it over a period of time. Each one of his reports is responsible for their own KPI, and ultimately he compiles one large report and has that ready for me to review, which we also use in board meetings.

Every employee should be accountable. Just make sure the reports mean something and they help you make decisions. If you have having them track every little thing, it is going to take away from their overall productivity.

Jared Reitzin
Small Business Help

If you are like me and not a big time Wall Street investor, I have a strategy for you, start buying sh*t. I know some pretty savvy investors and not one of them could have ever predicted what is happening right now. They also have no idea what is going to happen. I have witnessed grown men cry and throw up their arms, completely at a loss for what is happening to their portfolios and their precious Wall Street.

I found this report recently on The Business Sheet called The Biggest Losers and it basically gives you a breakdown of the top 20 global moguls who have gotten creamed in the recent economic collapse. Some of the smartest businessmen in the world are making horrible decisions, but is it their fault? Nobody could have predicted anything this dramatic going down.

So why am I telling you to start buying stocks?

Ever heard of beginners luck? Have you ever played poker and in your first “no limit” game you somehow walk away with 5x more than you sat down with? Poker pros get so upset when beginners win because they know the beginner has no idea when to hold them, or when to fold them. Beginners do not think too hard about a move they are going to make, and they certainly do not follow a specific play book. They just bet and hope for the best. I would say more often than not, novices walk away with a profit their first time out.

Aside from the well publicized fact that a ton of good companies have lost a huge portion of their market cap for no apparent reason, pros have no idea what to do at this point and it seems to me if you have some extra money to invest, now would be the perfect time to “go all in”.

In less than a week, I am up 35% on 4 companies. I got a tip here or there, but mostly went with my gut and invested in companies I like, and would continue to buy stuff from. I have this strange feeling in a few years pros are going to look at me with disgust; just like Hellmuth after taking a bad beat at the World Series.

Make some money and tell me about it.

Jared Reitzin
Small Business Entrepreneurship

We just posted my new webinar “Making Money With Mobile Coupons”.  95% of cellphones are text message enabled and 87% of the U.S. now has a cell phone. Mobile coupons are poised for

 tremendous growth over the next few years. A recent Juniper Research study says that coupons delivered and redeemed via mobile phones are forecast to be used by some 200 million mobile subscribers globally by 2013. If you have thought about getting into mobile marketing, this really is the perfect promotional channel and I think I do a decent job painting this picture. Visit the URL below, fill out some info on the left hand form and enjoy!

Watch Now!