It’s amazing how many people are afraid of making phone calls.

Do you procrastinate over phone calls? Even people who like talking on the phone have some kinds of calls that they don’t like to make–which means waiting too long to make them. Like sales calls–I’m amazed at how many sales people dread making phone calls, and literally lose money because they don’t make enough of them. For other people, it might be calling to complain to a company about an order you placed that they messed up.

How to phone the people you’re afraid to call:

1. Make a list of people you need to call. This implies “chunking”–putting a bunch of similar activities together. It’s a lot easier to make phone calls in clusters.
2. Make notes. Beside each name and number, write 1-2 sentences summarizing what needs to be said to them or what you need to ask them. Note form can work as well, eg:
   • Katsumi Roberts (Pine Crest Furniture). Ask if her company is finding our new accounting software useful. Explain to her how great our POS add-on could be.
   • Steve Koothrappali (Big Bang Events). What happened Saturday? Waiter obviously drunk. Get 20% discount.
3. When is best to call them? Make note of that too. Even a guess is good. That can dictate the order in which you make the calls.
4. Start with something a little difficult. On your list you’ll have easier and harder calls to make. Start with one of the harder calls, to get prepared, and then go for the really hard one. Once you’ve knocked them off your list, everything else will seem easier.
5. Promise yourself a reward after you’ve called them. Don’t get your next coffee until you’ve knocked three names off the list. And when you’ve called 10 people, you get to make that purchase on Amazon/Ebay/etc. that you’ve been wanting.
6. Smile when you call. This is crucial if it’s a sales call. But even if you’re calling for something unpleasant, it’s amazing how effective it can be to start off on a positive note. For one thing, people can hear your smile on the other end of the phone. And smiling will make you feel more confident, which helps you deal with difficult people and situations even better.
7. Celebrate a string of successful calls with that reward you promised yourself! Don’t stop too early though–as you make the calls, you’ll find you gain momentum and the calling becomes easier.

Jott just announced they’re ending their service. I’ve been using Jott’s transcription for a number of years to take notes by phone, and have the notes transcribed into text. What I particularly liked about the service was that it linked to other services I use, such as Google Calendar, Evernote and Twitter, as well as letting you send messages directly to your contacts.

I’ve looked at two options:

• Reqall seems like a cool service. They have apps for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc. Reqall seems focused on helping you remember things–hence the name. Reqall also connects to Evernote, Google Calendar, as well as Outlook, and even works for IM. It also has a free option, which Dial2Do doesn’t, and a lot of productivity-specific features.
• Dial2Do is closer to what Jott did. In addition to mobile apps they also have the ability to connect to Evernote, WordPress, Twitter, and a lot of other applications. The cheaper of their two pricing options is $2.50/month, which isn’t bad.

So who’s the winner?

Not surprisingly, the two services have different advantages.

• Free Memos to Self: Reqall — If price is a consideration, and if the main thing you’re looking for is memos to yourself (and a little help organizing your life) then check out Reqall.
• Voice to Everything: Dial2Do — The main advantage of Dial2Do seems to be the ability to interface with a lot more applications, the way Jott did. For the full-featured version it’s only $5.99/month (as of April 2011) which is in line with what Jott was charging.

I remember back in university, after I’d already started my first business, I took a workshop on entrepreneurship. It was supposed to help you figure out if you had what it took to be an entrepreneur, and so we discussed some of the characteristics of entrepreneurs.

The first on the list: you’ve been fired from a job. Apparently, most entrepreneurs have been fired at least once. Why? Because entrepreneurs usually aren’t good employees.

So why do we want to hire them?

Many of the business owners I know have made the mistake of hiring people and grooming them to be entrepreneurs. These business owners think they’re being clever by recognizing the kind of talent that their own bosses never recognized, and by giving their employees the powers and freedoms they never enjoyed in their own jobs. Just as importantly, the business owners hope that they can harness all that entrepreneurial energy to get more productivity out of their employees, to make a more successful business. And there’s that hope that it’s the path to owning rather than running a business. But it’s really just well-intentioned narcissism.

Where does it lead? Invariably these employees-turned-entrepreneurs do exactly what they’ve been trained to do: they start their own businesses. I saw one internet marketing company crumble after a carefully groomed employee left to found his own internet marketing company, taking most of the clients and some of the key staff with him. A few years later the same thing happened to a service industry company friends of mine owned.

We love to encourage entrepreneurship because that’s who we are. We want to raise little baby entrepreneurs within our own organization. But the reality is that a business doesn’t need more than one entrepreneur. And what that entrepreneur really needs is good management.

Entrepreneurship is such a buzzword these days that people try to attach it to just about anything. We’ll talk about a new CEO being “entrepreneurial” in her approach, or we’ll use neologisms like “intrapreneurship.” But don’t get confused: the CEO’s of great companies are rarely entrepreneurs unless they were also founders. And “intrapreneurs” are not internal entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are in love with creating, and taking risks. Entrepreneurs usually want to run the show, risk everything, and make a masterpiece.

Intrapreneurs aren’t the same. They’re innovators and risk-takers, but they love working within an existing system. It’s not a lesser role, just different: intrapreneurs have the end goal of leveraging the power of an existing organization to do new, wonderful things. It’s about bringing something new to a company that’s already great. In fact, intrapreneurs have the power to do a lot more than most entrepreneurs–such as the intrapreneurial creators of Gmail did within Google. More resources, more power to do cool stuff.

Great managers are also not usually entrepreneurs–in fact they’re the opposite. Where entrepreneurs often gravitate towards risk, managers learn how to minimize it. Entrepreneurs run the show, managers ensure the flow. Entrepreneurs create resources out of nothing, and… well, often managers have to do the same thing. But again, management is about taking a great thing and making it even greater, whereas entrepreneurship is about starting something you believe in, but that has no guarantee of being great or successful.

Smart entrepreneurs don’t hire entrepreneurs, they hire great employees, from magical managers to superstar salespeople.

The last few releases of Ubuntu have really shown the operating system to be an innovator and leader. I’ve been using Linux since the mid 90′s, and for years Linux-based operating systems were technically more impressive than Mac OS and Windows, but was always playing catchup on the desktop. That’s changed in more ways than one.

Ever since Mac OS X brought Unix technology to a well-established desktop, things like stability haven’t been so impressive anymore. And Windows 7 is really nothing to sneeze at. Linux operating systems really need to bring it.

And Ubuntu has definitely been pushing the envelope. Canonical doesn’t get the public credit it deserves for integrating an app-store style “Add Application” system seamlessly into the desktop before the iPhone’s App Store even existed. But recent Ubuntu editions have been getting ballsier, with Facebook and Twitter integration built directly into the desktop. For once, Linux is getting things that are truly useful to the end-user, before they make it to Windows or the Mac. Next up, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth is planning some aggressive (and controversial) changes to the Ubuntu desktop user interface.

Things are just getting interesting.

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.

–Rita Mae Brown, Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68

It can take years to become an overnight success.

Does my marketing suck?

Your marketing sucks if one of two things is true:

1. It doesn’t attract interest. This is simple to test. If it’s a web ad, use analytics to see whether or not people are clicking on your ads. Test multiple ads to see which ones people click on the most. For ads in traditional media, either connect the ad with a coupon (“bring this ad in for a free X”) or an offer code (“tell the cashier you heard about us on HITS 98.5 Radio”), or at least consistently ask your customers where they heard about you.
2. It attracts interest only from the wrong people. It doesn’t matter how much they love your new luxury sports coupe; if the only people who react to your ads are 15-year-old kids, you won’t sell any cars. Of course it can be more subtle than this, but it’s also fairly easy to test. On the web, you look at online purchases and requests for information resulting from your web marketing.

Does my product suck?

Small businesses need to focus on baby steps. The only way to know if your product is viable, is to see if even a very scaled-down version can sell. Both Apple and 37Signals have shown that if you get a few core features perfectly right, people will buy even if you seem to be missing other things that many people find important.

It’s about LOVE.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb: measure the viability of your product by the number of people who LOVE your product, who are not employees or relatives of employees… AND who will actually PAY for your product.

Ok, it’s also about PAYING.

Once you have paying customers who profess their undying love for you, your company, and your products, you actually have a viable target market. Now you just need to figure out where to get more of those people.

What if nobody loves me?

Maybe you need to look harder for the right customers (see the marketing stuff above). But you definitely need to make more opinionated products. With a new product, you can’t be everything to everyone–you can’t be MS Word. You have to be more like Twitter: really good at a few small features that work really well together:

• Bad: the restaurant that serves extremely mediocre burgers, pasta, chinese food, curry, and salads.
• Good: the burger joint that serves only amazing burgers and perfectly crispy fries.

Insanity is trying to push a product that no one loves.