These are the headshots I had done today. We’re starting to need them for the ProWorkflow business. What do ya think people? Thought I’d post these as not many people I deal with actually know what I look like.
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About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
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Note: John Walley is Chairman and a Director of ProActive Software Ltd, developers of the leading project management software www.proworkflow.com. John is involved with strategic planning and governance.
“A little while ago Julian asked me a question that ended up in this blog – not that I am one to blog. You will see from the PWF website I am on the high side of fifty and not “techie” in the “Twitter” sense of the word. However at a functional level I was using email regularly in the early 90’s and I get nostalgic about DOS (in the operating system sense).
Anyhow out of the blue or maybe after a session of me wondering out loud about the utility of channels like Twitter, the following question from Julian hit my inbox.”
From: Julian ProActive [mailto:HIDDEN]
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 10:29 PM
To: John
Subject: re: Software
Out of curiosity, how are you liking/finding the software world of today (business/marketing-wise) versus say 5-10 years ago? Just wondered what you thought of the new culture…
Web2, SaaS, Marketing (can of worms), 100’s of competitors, etc…
Any thoughts on the industry?
You’ve got huge experience in Manufacturing and software as well as other areas and have seen changes in models over the years. I was just wondering what you thought of the online world today?
That is just the sort of question I get a lot my interactions with the worlds 20 and 30 somethings and they often make me think hard, probably harder than is good for me. My answer:
From: John Walley [mailto:HIDDEN]
Sent: Wednesday, 4 February 2009 6:18 a.m.
To: Julian ProActive
Subject: RE: Software
The world is the way the world is, at some level it has not changed – at least in my observation – that much. Basic principles remain and probably always will.
Finding customers, keeping customers, charging the right price that balances the needs of both sides and doing in a way that keeps the wheels on has always been the challenge – it is a bit like your Web 2 yes or no discussions – beauty/difference is in the eye of the beholder.
What has changed is access speed and turn round times have dropped dramatically – that places more pressure on individuals but somewhere in there is individual creativity, welding that to the new tools is the trick, but the tools always need the craftsman.
For the craftsman the challenge is to learn how the new tools best fit the craft.
As a result of this email Julian asked me to do a guest blog on Julian 101 “thoughts from ProWorkflow’s old chairman” well you can see some above; the only thing I would add would be for those of you who don’t have an older person on the team get one, you will make each other think harder and that has to be good for you, your company, your customers and the mutual dependency that of necessity binds you all together.
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About the author:
John Walley – Chairman: ProActive Software
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We’re regularly asked about reseller and affiliate programs by happy customers or tech companies so we’re please to offer an affiliate program for referrals to sale.
Refer people and companies to the ProWorkflow solution and when they sign up as an ongoing customer, we’ll thank you with an affiliate payment! Easy!
Note: The affiliate program only pays out for Subscription accounts at this time (ie: not code sales)
WHATS THE COMMISSION STRUCTURE?
ProWorkflow subscription accounts sell for $10, $20 or $30 per user per month depending on the plan chosen.
We have 3x plans ($10, 20, 30 per user p/m). But ultimately there is a monthly price for an account based on the number of staff users.
So for example, a typical sale could be $160 per month.
The Affiliate program pays out the first month’s value of the signup as a one-off affiliate payment. This payment is paid out after the 3rd month the customer is with us.
Example: Customer signs up on the 15th Jan 09 for a $160 per month account
ProWorkflow receives from the customer:
$160 on June 15, 2009
$160 on July 15, 2009
$160 on August 15, 2009
The Affiliate program will pay out $160 (first month) to the affiliate when 3rd month’s invoice is billed, ie: after the 15th August.
How does it work? Where are the banners?
When signed up, login to the Affiliate area and click on the ‘Creative’ tab. There are banner ads and text links to place on your website. Simply copy the appropriate code, place it on your site and the ads will appear. People that click the ad and sign up for a subscription account are tracked and will appear in your reports.
Note: Affiliate payments are only applicable for sales that occur within 180 days of clicking on your website ad.
WHERE IS THE REPORTING?
You will have access to a login area for affiliates where you have access to comprehensive reports about your referred traffic and affiliate sales.
HOW DO I GET PAID?
We are using the MyAp system for the affiliate program. This is one of the leading solutions for affiliate management. As part of our contract with MyAp, we will approve payments and transactions, but MyAp will post cheques out to affiliates when due. These will be sent out on the timeframe shown above.
WHAT IF I HAVE QUESTIONS?
If you come across any issues or have questions, please contact us through our contact form.
The ProWorkflow solution – www.proworkflow.com is a web based project management solution developed in New Zealand by a tight virtual team. Our servers are in California, the CTO (Founder) in New Plymouth, CEO (Founder) in Rural Christchurch with some staff, and a top developer in Fiji! We’re a tight team and we have focused on process automation so our costs grow slower than sales – what we call a low inertia business.
From day one, we set out to build a global business founded on our low inertia business model. We’ve never just been NZ focussed, it is as easy to reach Los Angeles, London or Levin so why not?
We’ve worked hard to setup automation for trials, sales, support, billing, licensing, client account maintenance and support; leaving our staff free to really talk to customers. The model has run in profit from day one and the organic growth has allowed us to invest revenue back into the business to support top class infrastructure to support our SaaS application.
“Remember that in SaaS, the app is to SaaS what the hamburger is to MacDonalds – people forget that. The app is a small part. To go global the BUSINESS MODEL and INFRASTRUCTURE and SYSTEMS need to scale… The actual application is the least of your worries. Automation and infrastructure leave people to do what they do best, interact with people to solve problems.”
Supplementing our top team, the backend system called “ProCodeManager, which has seen nearly as much development as ProWorkflow is the ‘Engine’ behind the business and provides us with information on every bit of activity in the business, including dashboards for all user activity, follow up, account management, and financial performance. PCM also highlights issues, ie: mail backing up, server errors etc. So it helps keep us all on the ball!
The company has no debt, no cash needs beyond sustainable growth, market salaries, corporate governance, no need for funding, sufficient cash in bank to consider dividends, a 7 figure revenue and a growing happy user base. We can see the growth and customers tell us PWF really helps in their business – a great place to be, The PWF solution is essentially ‘recession-friendly’ as it allows customers to focus on efficiencies. Saving money in hard times is a handy substitute for revenue growth. Furthermore big business is breaking into small businesses in the USA (and all over), creating a much larger market of SME’s (our target market).
As about 75% of our revenue is charged in USD from offshore customers and the US Dollar has finally returned to a realistic cross rate that has been a shot in the arm for us, we really would like to see the New Zealand government taking more note in policy of our wild currency fluctuations. It would help us plan better.
In our view the key metric for business is revenue per employee, we are driving for a target of US350k per person, at this level we are relatively immune to what the world does in terms of economic activity. We are exposed to some risk through broadband connectivity so the better and faster our connections to the world the better for us.
Expenses are relatively fixed and we should be able to drive about 300-500k of revenue per staff member.
With hard work and determined effort we have made page 1 on Google for the term “Project Management Software” and are now finding an increasing number of referral based sales as we’ve been around a few years now. We’ve been aligning our marketing spend to our product releases and the tidiness of PCM and will tweak it more as our organic growth increases.
We released Xero and QuickBooks integration last year, a Time Tracking Widget in Q3 08 and have just finished the ProWorkflow API. We have a growing number of developers lining up to get into the API, either to integrate with their intranets or to build cool apps! We plan to build an app library for the ProWorkflow solution this year.
The ProWorkflow affiliate program is about to be launched late Feb and our plan is to drive this hard. We want to reward those who refer sales to us.
As our biggest user base is in the US, and the US has been dropping around 500,000 jobs each month, we have of course noticed some slowdown over recent months. But once customers move past the shock of revenue falls, efficiency soon gets on the radar – so growth, for us, is back. For us 2009 is about pushing out to new customers, keeping on keeping on with our efforts to supply good products, build on top class infrastructure from a low inertia operation.
So yes, we are in great shape. Slim, trim and rocking! We will continue to work hard to support our customers and help then find efficiencies – a real substitute for revenue growth until the global economy bounces back
And my advice on company survival does not change in hard times or at any time. Grow sales faster than costs, automate process, focus people on the stuff only people can do, have a real value (savings or revenue growth) proposition for your customers, if you can, be international from New Zealand.
Remember, if you have to SELL a product, you’re doing something wrong. Instead, you should be FACILITATING a purchase. Think about that for a bit…
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About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
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Most tech-aware people would have heard by now that on 30th Jan 09m Ma.gnolia http://ma.gnolia.com/ suffered a massive data corruption and loss scenario. Basically, the poo hit the fan and they lost all their users’ data and had no restorable backups! If you go to their website now you’ll see a sad looking holding page: (click to enlarge)
I’d say at a guess that it’ll be the end of them. It’s not easy to claw back credibility after an event like that. However, they were just a bookmarking service. You imagine this happening to a major SaaS application provider, ie: Project management, accounting, documents, etc.
I’m trying to drive a little healthy fear into people as there are many online apps that haven’t addressed their infrastructure and backups. They may look good on the front end, but could just be a one man band with one server and no backups behind the scenes.
Make sure you do your homework when choosing a SaaS vendor for your business applications. At ProActive Software (www.proworkflow.com) we take the security and sensitivity of your vital business and project info very seriously and have professional infrastructure and top security, setup at who we consider the USA’s top data center – www.fastservers.net.
Here’s our data security page: Read about ProWorkflow Data Security.
Regarding backups, the ProWorkflow solution has automatic monitored backups that run 4x daily with a 14 day retention. That means we keep 56 copies of every customers’ database backup for up to 2 week rollbacks! The latest 4x backups are kept on the subscription servers and others are kept on the Fastservers remote backup servers.
In addition! We also allow customers to download their full database backup file at ANY time from within the application!
As it happens, sometimes you need the backups to restore for silly things, like if a customer intentionally (or accidentally) deletes a pile of their precious data…
Here’s an example of a ‘non-stressful’ backup restore we hade to do today. No big dramas… But was the easiest way to fix the issue for the customer.
Good Morning PWF,
We seem to have lost an entire category and our custom “look and feel”. We are looking for our Member Bank Projects category. Is there a way that you kind find and restore?
- CLIENT
Hi there,
Re: Look’n’feel. Just checking your audit log, it seems that XXXX (your Staff) has reset your look’n’feel settings. We’re not able to simply bring these back as it was a chosen option, however we could do this by restoring a backup.
Re: Projects Category. The Project Category was deleted on 2 Feb 09, and subsequently all projects and tasks within this category were deleted as that was the chosen option.
We’re either able to run a script to bring this info back, or restore a backup from before this time (all data entered since that time will be unavailable if we go with this option).
I’ll give you a call and check how you’d like to proceed.
- PROWORKFLOW STAFF
Hi PWF,
I think we’ll have to go with the restore of a backup. I understand that anything that happened this morning after the restored backup will be lost.
- CLIENT
Hi there,
Your account has now been restored from the latest backup which was made at 4.30am on 2 February.
- PROWORKFLOW STAFF
Hi PWF,
Perfect! You guys saved my life…or at least my sanity :-)
- CLIENT
SO it pays to have backups eh!
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About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
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