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e-commerce Solutions – Jamaican Lifestyle

It’s till very early to say what shape Jamaican e-commerce will take.

One important service to consider is a one-of-a-kind service offered by JamaicanLifestyle.com.

I used the service recently to send out an email message to its 24,500 odd email address database that a new e-book that I had written was available — for free. The response I received was a decent one, with some 150 or so downloads. By international standards, this was not a bad response — testimony to the kind of members they have on their database.

It’s entirely an opt-in database, which means that their members are a part of the list because they chose freely at some point to receive their emails. Most of the email that gets sent out is static — there are merely e-flyers with no call for action, and no clickable links that do anything other than take a user to a web page with a graphic of the same e-flyer.

Most of their content seems to be party and product advertisements. I believe that I was the first to try what I tried — here was the ad I sent.


Here in Jamaica…

Can professionals obtain

Time Management, Productivity and Stress-Free Results?!!


In the last 7 days…

Has more email come into your already filled Inbox?

Have you missed an appointment?

Were you late for more than 2 meetings?

Did you feel a slight loss of peace of mind?

Was a sense of accomplishment missing?

If so, this free e-book for Jamaican professionals might help.

Available now, and for the next 72 hours ONLY

E-book:
“2Time Capturing — A Time Management Fundamental for Jamaican Managers”

Click on this page to claim your free copy, or follow the link below: http://fwconsulting.com/e-bookja

Clicking took a respondent directly to my landing page, where they could sign up to receive the e-book from my auto-responder. Apparently, I was the first customer to try something like this, testimony to the paucity of e-commerce activity in Jamaica.

Unfortunately, not everyone got the mailing — and I don’t know how many received it. My wife didn’t get it on her Gmail account, and neither did a friend of mine. On the other hand, I got it promptly, as did another friend of mine.

There were actually four emails that my wife didn’t get from the service, that I received, all within a 24 hour period. I’m still waiting to hear back from Jamaican Lifestyle after 3 weeks of emails and calls to account for the “blackout” that apparently happened. It could be due to any number of factors… was there a glitch in the matrix?

So, it’s not a perfect service, but I did get better than average results, which tells me that those who received it found it at least unique.

A recent broadcast I received had someone offering coaching services, along with her phone number and email address. We are truly in the early days of e-commerce in Jamaica!

I expect that there will be increasingly sophisticated offers by companies in the future, including the first webpage that allows for the use of a local credit card for purchases. PayMaster seems to be ahead in the game of accepting online payments — we shall see how things develop.

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Doing Business with Internet Strangers

Here in the Caribbean, there has always been this tendency to want to meet someone before doing business with them. We want to “look dem in dem face” before deciding whether or not we can trust them or not.

We “don’t know them from Adam”, and we can’t imagine putting good money at risk with a stranger. After all, we have no idea what school they went to, who their parents are, or what their friends are like. It all makes sense in a small-town kind of way.

However, this same kind of thinking keeps networks small, and professionals suspicious. It ensures that one’s circle remains tiny, relative to the kind of network that is needed to operate a global business.

For example, in a small business, as soon as too many strangers get involved, an owner is likely to slow things down by insisting that he/she needs to meet the people involved himself.

When it comes to doing business on the internet, such thinking is damaging.

In this new era, business-people MUST become comfortable doing business with people they have never met, will never meet and who may not even speak the same language. For older business owners, this is quite difficult to do, having grown up in a time when everyone knew everyone else, and the fact that they lived on an island kept them away from much of the world.
For anyone starting a new business, however, this skill is critical — knowing how to create partnerships via electronic means.

The sister skill of creating an online presence (by design versus by accident) is just as important., as people need to know whether or not you can be trusted, and are someone to do business with, without ever meeting you.

There is a systematic way of determining who can be trusted, and who can’t. The easiest way is to learn who they are by knowing their friends. Facebook is a must in this regard.

Other ways include getting to know them through their content — what they have written, composed, photographed, listened to, painted, blogged, created, started-up, accomplished, failed at — anything that is a product of their efforts.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about “think-slicing” — a way of understanding complex ideas in a moment. Figuring out whether someone you meet on the internet can be trusted can be built on that same skill.

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Perfectionists Are Losers

I just read a most inspiring and wonderful post from a fellow blogger — Pamela Slim — from the blog “Escape from Cubicle Nation“.

It’s entitled “Perfectionists are Losers” and it builds on the idea that anyone who starts a project with the goal of getting things perfectly right is planting the seeds of their own destruction from the very outset.

I can relate… the past few months have seen me venturing into the world of e-commerce, testing out numerous landing pages, publishing my first e-book, putting out my first podcast, using Facebook for marketing purposes… plus more.

I keep telling my wife that “I don’t know what I’m doing…!” I am happily making things up as I go along, which is only saying it a little better than the way she puts it… “pulling things out of my butt”. The truth is that sometimes I have felt that way, and I wonder at different times whether or not I am wasting my time,. I imagine that someplace out there people are laughing their asses off at the nonsense I am doing!

(If you are laughing your ass off right now, STOP IT — this is a serious post…. 😉 )

All this proves Pamela’s point, fortunately. She says, very wisely:

What highly productive and successful people do is spend as little time as possible at the edge of opportunities, agonizing whether or not to move forward.

Hey, this puts my typos, ugly designs, hellish grammar, non-radio voice, too-many-ads — well, all of it — in perspective!

She quotes a book — “Bird by Bird” – when speaking about writing….

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really sh*tty first drafts.

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those crazy six pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you are supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go- but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”

This is SUCH good news!

She also says that who you hang out with IS important:

Tip #3: Hang out in the right barbershop

A friend of mine said “If you hang out in a barbershop, sooner or later, you are going to get a haircut.”

This is SO well said… now I know why I like the company of certain types of people, just because…

She is SO inspiring!!!

You can read the entire article here.

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The Gang of X

The other day I met a friend of mine who is a bona-fide change agent in her company.

It reminded me of my first change effort as an employee of AT&T Bells Labs. A group of us decided to stop complaining that things should change and do something about it.

We started the “Gang of X” and started meeting, discussing the new Division we wanted to create. It was all quite exciting, and got even more so when we published something like a manifesto for change, outlining the change we wanted to see.

At the time it seemed quite risky, but we were wrong. It really wasn’t.

In time, all the changes we outlined came to pass but not before I left the company to start my own firm. In time, the organization was dissolved when AT&T split into Lucent and AT&T, and the division’s staff was scattered in to the wind.

But the Gang of X was a life-changing event that I don’t regret, even after I got pissed when the changes weren’t happening fast enough.

It helped to lead my to the profession I now have, in which I get to work with change agents of all kinds who share one thing in common — a desire to make a difference.

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Building Bridges for Business

It struck me recently that it is quite difficult for a Jamaican who has never lived abroad to understand the economic potential in Jamaican culture and our island’s beauty.

Also, it is just as hard for a Jamaican living abroad who retains no ties back home whatsoever to take advantage of the benefits they have of being Jamaican.

Enter the Jamaican who chooses to live in both worlds — the larger world outside Jamaica and a life in Jamaica. They are a unique resource, in that they understand two worlds that are quite unique, and an understanding of both worlds makes them quite valuable.

For example, is Trench Town a special resource? Only a few Jamaicans living on the island would agree, but this happens to be the place that I was was asked about the most frequently when I lived in the U.S. Could it be turned into a kind of meccas for lovers of reggae music and Bob Marley?

We are gifted with one of the prettiest countries in the world, yet much of our country remains hidden from tourists the world over who would be stunned at the places that don’t make it to the brochures, some of which don’t even have names. We Jamaicans take the mountains, valleys, waterfalls, fruits, birds, sun — all for granted. And because we can’t see those things with “outsider eyes” we don’t think deeply enough about how to share them with the world.

It’s not an overstatement to state that we Jamaicans who go abroad truly discover the beauty of our country when we get off the plane in Miami, New York or Toronto. All of a sudden a naseberry, a quiet beach and a walk in the mountains in the morning become luxury items.

Enjoying them becomes a matter of working very, very hard, saving a lot of money, and spending it on the little 2 weeks “dem give us” each year that we use to travel home to try to take everything in at once.

Jamaicans who can see both worlds can see opportunities that are invisible to others. This speaks to new ventures that are just waiting to be started, and those of us who are business-minded could do no worse than to take the bull by the horns, and launch them.

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Clients I Can’t Work With

I have found it virtually impossible to work with a certain kind of client — the one that insists that they already know, or his colleague, the one that is afraid of looking like they don’t already know.

The result is the same — a certain lack of progress as they defend their egos against looking bad. With them, things have to start looking VERY bad before they are willing to put results over their personal view of themselves. And there are times when that approach just takes too long to make a difference.

On the opposite side of the coin, however, is the client who is willing to learn at every turn. They make the best clients, and usually become friends. The quest to do good first and foremost, helps us both to put our egos in check, and makes projects flow smoothly and sweetly, such that they hardly feel like work at all.

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The Productivity of Jamaican Workers

A colleague of mine recently shared with me that foreign executives and project managers in the bauxite industry use a factor of 2 to 2.5 when estimating how much labour it takes to get a job done.

In other words, in Jamaica it takes more than twice the same number of man-hours to do the same work as elsewhere, and I imagine that this is referring to mostly manual labour rather than knowledge work.

If true, this is a pretty startling statistic, but it starts to explain why prices here in Jamaica seem to be high for no reason at times. I do know that security costs make up a higher percentage of total costs than in other countries, which makes sense given our high crime rates. That much is plain to see.

What’s not so obvious to see is that we are often using more than twice the workforce needed.

Apparently, the Chinese workers that were here for the World Cup put our own labourers to shame, and in the garment industry in particular, they have shown that they, as it was said “can do de work of two s’maddy” (2 people that is).

I guess the colloquial wisdom in this case matches the actual measurements of bauxite-industry managers…

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Recession and Productivity

Talk of a recession in the U.S. is now fully underway.

In the Caribbean, we have just begun to talk about the fact that when a recession hits the U.S., the after-effects are felt here. As if the increase in oil prices were not enough, we can also expect to see a drop in tourist visits and a decrease in average tourist spending. This affects our bottom-line in Jamaica and other countries in the region that are dependent on the tourist industry as the biggest earner of foreign exchange.

If a recession is to come to the region, then we can expect to see redundancies as companies cut their payrolls to keep their costs in line with a reduction in business.

It’s a good time for employees to start to think about a strategy to make themselves invaluable to their employers. An employee would do well to find ways to do more with less, as the chances are good that their managers are going to be turning to them to ask them to do just that.

If a redundancy is announced, it’s likely that the least productive employees are the ones that are at the greatest risk. In turn, the most productive ones will be assuming the workload of those that are laid off.

While most managers won’t give their employees anything new to deal with the extra load, the smart ones will start now to give them tools, training and alternatives that help them get the job done.

For example, elance, the outsourcing service, offers an excellent value for money, and now would be a good time to get used to using the service. Also, Framework’s NewHabits-NewGoals productivity programme would be an alternative for professionals looking to boost their ability to deal with more each day.

It also might be a good time to buy that extra memory for the laptop, or to set up work-at-home arrangements wherever possible — all in favour of boosting productivity.

The current estimates say that a recession won’t be felt here in the region until 9-12 months from now, so there is still ample time to prepare.

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Managing the Exploding Inbox

The following article was carried in the Sunday Gleaner today (with some edits) :

Here is the original article:
——————————————————————

It’s one of those issues that everyone complains about – “my Email Inbox has 500 items.” The retort draws a quick response — “Oh yeah, that’s nothing… mine has 5,000!”

Email explosion is one of the favourite things that Caribbean professionals across the region bemoan, but feel they can do little about. They suffer as they watch the size of their Inbox grow, and devote weekends, public holidays and even vacation days to getting rid of the monster. Once they do so, there is a feeling of relief as order returns to their tired psyches.

However, a month later it’s back.

Some try the trick of periodically copying all their messages to a bottomless folder, returning their Inbox to ground zero. Others simply delete everything, deciding that anything that’s in there is probably not valuable, and “if it’s really important, they can call.”

On the other side of each email, however, is someone who genuinely wants a response of some kind. The sender waits, while forming an unfavourable opinion of the person that has not replied. Cleaning shop by deleting emails en masse is risky business.

What can be done to address this problem that most will admit is not going away, and is likely to only get worse?

Face the Unproductive Facts

The first insight is the hardest to swallow: an overflowing Inbox is a sign of weak time management and productivity skills.

It’s not due to “those people” who won’t give us a break. It’s not that we are “bad at email.” It’s also not God’s fault for refusing to give us more hours in the day.

Recent research by Framework Consulting shows that an overflowing Inbox is a sign that the user probably has not learned, and is definitely not using, the best time management practices. Their Inbox is only reflecting the results of the habits they are using.

The solution? It turns out that a complex set of skills must be mastered in order to produce the Holy Grail of professional productivity – a perpetually empty Inbox.

That is no trick. A perpetually empty Inbox is not one that is blocked from other users, and does not come from changing an email address, job, country or computer. Instead, it is one that involves the skilful handling of email as soon as it arrives.

How is this accomplished?

The 11 Fundamentals

An empty Inbox is not created overnight. Instead, it involves the steady application of a set of habits that must practised continuously, like a forward defensive stroke or a scale in C major.

Of the 11 fundamentals, we have found that 7 of them are critical to properly manage email. These seven practices comprise the core of all complete time management systems, and once they are each mastered to a high enough level, the empty inbox is a natural outcome. When any of them is missing, the result is Inbox overload.

Here are the 7 core practices essential to proper email management.

  1. Capturing: using the email Inbox for temporary storage only, and for quick emptying. Messages are downloaded from a server only upon request.
  2. Emptying: moving messages out of the Inbox to other folders as soon as it’s practical
  3. Tossing: permanently deleting emails that won’t be acted on
  4. Acting Now: taking immediate action on messages that require 5 minutes or less to be completed
  5. Storing: placing information from messages in different folders for future retrieval
  6. Scheduling: using messages to create appointments for solo or group work e.g. to block out time for an interview, or time to review a document
  7. Listing: taking information from messages and adding them to lists for later action e.g. a list of items to be covered in a meeting agenda

Perhaps the biggest change that most professionals can make immediately is turn off the ability of their email programme to download messages automatically. Instead, in order to “Capture” properly, they must manually download email at pre-appointed times, while disciplining themselves to rarely, if ever, check email at other times.

None of these practices are easy to implement, especially as they are simply not taught in schools. Most of us put together a time management system without guidance in time to pass our 11+ examinations, and we are stuck with our creations that were meant for an age when email wasn’t invented.

The advent of email, with its 24 hour demands, means that we must all “up our game.” Instead of relying on home-grown approaches that were incomplete and ill-informed, we as professionals must take the next step to deliberately design our own time management systems. Using the 7 core practices as building blocks is just a start. A perpetually empty Inbox is a powerful milestone to accomplish.

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Opening a Business in Jamaica

I can finally say that I have made it through a critical process — that of opening up, and registering a business in Jamaica.

The entire process was a daunting one, and I can understand why they say that we have one of the most inefficient tax systems in the world. I have been putting off this post, because I needed to recover a bit from the whole thing so that I could write with some perspective.

The first step is to register the company, and that took several months due to a variety of glitches, some caused by me and the way in which I was trying to set things up. I eventually settled on creating a company that is entirely owned by a U.S. company that I own.

The paperwork was fairly straight-forward, and I used a local company called Profits and Dividends to get this step done. The end-result of this activity (which cost some US$700 or so) was to receive the Registration papers for the company and a company stamp.

In essence this was the simplest step.

The next steps were all necessary in order to have even a single employee. They need to be done with some precision, due to the fact that they all involve travel around Kingston from one office to another, and it’s quite easy to get turned back from the office in order to retrieve a single paper that was forgotten. As my wife said, just bring everything that you think might be needed with you in a briefcase .

  1. The first stop was the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) office in New Kingston, at 18 Ripon Road, off Oxford Road.

    You need to bring all your company registration documents plus a full copy. Also have a personal Taxpayer Registration Number (TRN) and driver’s licence handy for each of the steps. Fill out the NIS form for the business, and for all the employees in the business if they have never been registered.

    Get the slip, and the letter that indicate that you are registered.

  2. Visit the Tax Office some time between the 3rd and 25th of the month to avoid the end of month rush. Sign up for a Business TRN. Bring a copy of the registration. The wait for this to be completed is about 5 minutes.
  3. Once completed, stay at the Tax Office to register for General Consumption Tax (GCT) payments.
  4. If a Tax Compliance Certificate (TCC) is needed, then a visit to National Housing Trust (NHT) and the Tax Office are needed. These are used to clear items from customs and are good for six months.

What makes the process difficult is the movement back and forth during working hours from one office to another. I haven’t actually paid payroll taxes yet, so that will be another bit of excitement, to be sure.