I’ve always enjoyed reading Seth Godin’s books and blog posts. And recently his blog posts have been extraordinarily good.

And if you are interested in small business and the revolution we are in the midst of, these two posts are must-read:

The Realization is Now
The Opportunity is Here

These posts sum up so much of what is important for small businesses online. They are short and to the point and I suggest you read them in full … but I’d still like to highlight these quotes.

It takes a long time for a generation to come around to significant revolutionary change. The newspaper business, the steel business, law firms, the car business, the record business, even computers… one by one, our industries are being turned upside down, and so quickly that it requires us to change faster than we’d like.

and

Note! Like all revolutions, this is an opportunity, not a solution, not a guarantee. It’s an opportunity to poke and experiment and fail and discover dead ends on the way to making a difference. The old economy offered a guarantee–time plus education plus obedience = stability. The new one, not so much. The new one offers a chance for you to take a chance and make an impact.

I love this little chart about Needles and Haystacks.

Perfect description of running a business online.

Found courtesy of Paul Boomer on Twitter.

Dateline: 2111

Once upon a time (in 1911) the Australian Government founded the Commonwealth Bank of Australia “to promote land settlement and rural development”.

In 2011 (exactly 100 years later) the Australian Government established the National Payment Gateway of Australia (NPGA).

The NPGA was established with a very simple mandate: help Australian business participate in the global economy through an accessible, reliable and secure payment gateway and thereby promote online development for Australia.

The NPGA meant that Australian businesses could manage payments from and to any other country in the world just as easily as they could manage payments within Australia. With research and development on payment gateways being driven by larger economies, Australia had been at a disadvantage. Not just because of slower access to the Internet than competitors, but through complex, limited access to global payments compared to business in other countries.

Coupled with the rollout of an expanded national broadband service, the NPGA meant Australian business was not only able to connect to the global marketplace but was able to transact with the rest of the world on a level playing field.

The availability of a simple payment system with a security guarantee from the Australian government (just like the financial guarantee supplied to the Commonwealth Bank a century previously) meant Australian business was able to grow confidently online.

Editor: with the benefit of hindsight it is perhaps easy to say this was just common sense. But a decision like this must have been much harder back then, with many commercial interests involved.

I’ve used Guru.com to source freelancers previously, and have found it a useful service.

However recently Guru.com have announced they are updating their feedback policy:

Feedback reviews are now more reliable.
Feedback is a valuable tool to help you find the pro you need. However, on rare occasions it can be skewed due to personal bias or even abused when used as retaliation or as a threat. To ensure that feedback retains its integrity and value, both Employers and Freelancers may now choose to remove a limited number of feedback records from their profiles.

(my emphasis)

So you can remove feedback you don’t like. And the bigger users of Guru.com can block more negative feedback than smaller users.

Now it seems to me that people will just use this to block negative feedback whenever they can, not just on ‘rare occasions’.

Feedback systems on the web are much harder to manage because there is often a global marketplace involved. If a business fakes negative feedback about a competitor in a local newspaper, there is a good chance they can be tracked down and sued. Online there may be no practical legal redress.

So will this change make feedback on Guru.com more reliable?

I don’t think so. It gives me a reason not to trust the feedback that I see there.

So how could Guru.com make their feedback system more trustworthy? I don’t know about you, but an unblemished record doesn’t always look trustworthy. You have to ask yourself ‘Is it real?’ I want to see the footprints of a real business, and a real business doesn’t get everything right.

A more trustworthy feedback system might allow a way for employers and service providers to make an effort to fix things if they get them wrong. This happens in business all the time, if a customer is unhappy a business will often go out of their way to see if they can change that around.

Taking the real story out of the web isn’t the way to earn more trust.

High Growth Small Businesses Chart, by Scott Shane at Small Business Trends

Do you know which businesses do well in a recession? I didn’t, until I read about Recession Proof Small Businesses from Scott Shane at Small Business Trends.

Scott analysed those business segments that did well during the 2001-03 recession and the 1990-91 recession. Doing well was defined as a segment growing by more than 20% across each of the following indicators: number of establishments, number of employees, total payroll. (Data: US Census).

The take out at the end of the article is that “insurance, health care, and consulting tend to be recession-resistant industries for people running small businesses.” Reading the article is recommended, as there are 42 individual industry segments Scott identified that beat the 20% hurdle in all three areas.

So there you have it. 3 stand out segments for recession business.

Are you in one of these segments, or do you serve some of these segments? 

Do you have an online strategy for these recession businesses?