Joomla templates and offshore programming.

In 2006 American businessman Warren Buffet made the largest charitable donation in US history by giving over 37 billion dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Buffet was once asked if he felt that people should follow his model and build their business and personal wealth first, then make a substantial donation to charity once they are able. His answer was no. He explained that unless you are a proven expert at growing money dramatically and can generate massive amounts of wealth (far beyond what you might generate in the housing or stock market), you'll be doing more good by giving a smaller amount today. 

You don't have to be a billionaire to make a difference, and although most of us may never break any records for charitable giving, we can all incorporate giving into our businesses no matter what our financial picture looks like.  According to Richard Jolly, chairman of Giving USA, the bulk of the approximately 300 billion dollars donated by Americans to charity each year comes from individuals rather than corporations. Most of that money is generated through small donations, and when it all adds up it really makes a difference.

As a small business owner, a great approach is to make an affordable donation to charity every month. Even a tiny, struggling business can afford a $10/month donation to charity. Over time your small donations can really add up.

Monthly giving can become part of your routine operations, and will give you an immediate and visible reward for your business efforts. Rather than donating on a whim and worrying about whether it's enough or too much, a monthly donation has the advantage of being planned, predictable and easy to manage. Your recurring monthly donations can be an automated, so that the whole process requires minimal effort on your part. Monthly giving also has the benefit of bringing charitable giving into your monthly bookkeeping routine, thus making donations a real part of your business rather than an occasional event.

Over time, your business will grow and hopefully your donations will grow along with it. You may choose to increase your monthly donation (which will make your accountant happy!) or you can take advantage of the many opportunities to 'give back' with your business.  You can donate your time, your services, or your old computers. Along the way, your CPA can advise you on how to make the most of your charity dollars and optimize the tax reduction aspects of giving to charity.

Can your business afford $5/month to help charity? If so, why not start today and start giving. If you aren't ready for the monthly commitment, you can make a single donation to CARE International by clicking here, and the minimum is just $5.

One of the most common requests that we get from our clients is for support in the incorporation process. In most cases, this starts out as a 'corp. vs. LLC' conversation, and quickly turns into a high-level discussion about the business's objectives and plans. Clients usually come to us expecting that we will recommend they create an LLC online and go on their merry way. In the majority of cases, however, the best option may be a corporation or even to remain a sole proprietor while you determine the absolute best way forward.

Dissolving (shutting down) a business entity requires some paperwork and will usually have fees involved, so it can be quite an expensive mistake to choose the wrong entity. In addition, a business entity usually needs to have its own taxes filed at the end of each year (except for a single-owner LLC,  in some cases) and even if you decide to close the business you'll probably still wind up paying an accountant to prepare the returns. So, better to get it right the first time!

I love hourly rates. I don’t do fixed-bid projects. I’ve written multiple articles and mentored clients about the benefits of hourly billing, and over time I’ve watched many freelancers and boutique firms abandon the fixed-bid model and move to hourly rate. The pros and cons of hourly billing can be discussed endlessly so I won’t get into that here, but this month was such a triumph for the hourly model that I thought a blog entry was in order.

Over the past 10 days, a series of events has happened which has demonstrated how an hourly model can result in a flexible, low-stress model which is good for everyone:

• We were about 50 hours into a complicated e-commerce site when the client suddenly announced that they want to make major changes to the designs, which were approved 6-weeks ago! Rather than being frustrated, I am fine with that because we’ll simply get the designer back in to mockup some new designs and bill all the hours that she spends doing it. We don’t need a change order or anything, we just bill for the extra work and keep going. The client knows this because we’ve been giving him projections along the way. So, this ‘big change’ results in higher profits for me without any paperwork or new agreements – just a single email saying that this would probably add 30 hours to the project.

• A new client started a consulting project with me. I was to help him author a technical spec for an application he’s building. We got about 5 hours into the project and he had a family emergency. No problem at all – I’ll bill him for the hours he used and we’ll simply stop working for a while. Our written agreement is still in effect and when he’s ready to resume we’ll just start up again.

• Another client who disappeared about 6 months ago for unknown reasons showed up again and we picked right up where we left off. There was no paperwork, change order, or approval. He just wanted to know how many hours we estimated (and thus the approximate cost) to complete the project, and when he agreed we went right back into production.

• A reseller client brought an urgent Joomla template job which one of his in-house programmers had messed up. We were in the middle of a job for him, and he agreed that we would push back the first job a week so that we could take care of the Joomla template. There was no paperwork or negotiation at all because reseller clients have a general services agreement with us and it covers all projects they submit. He sent us the spec and the developers jumped right on in.

• As usual, a handful of established clients trickled in their 2 or 3 hours jobs here and there – fixes, tweaks, and tiny modifications to older projects. There is never any question of whether we should do these fixes as part of the original job (which happens in fixed-bid projects) or how much they should pay for these small things. We just bill actual hours and that’s that. No paperwork. No minimum. Since our profit margin doesn't change with smaller jobs, we're happy to take them.

• Finally, and this was my favorite thing of the month, we completed a Joomla site for a university and I looked at the final numbers. We estimated the project early on but found that some of the complexities that we expected to deal with weren’t all that complex after all. So, we were able complete the job in about 130 hours less than we expected. Of course, the client benefited from that as they wound up spending much less than they had agreed to!

Sure, there is a downside in that last item because we could have easily charged the client what we estimated and made higher profits. But, our profit margin is always the same because we are time-based, so we were paid the same amount for our time as we would have if it had taken longer. And, we have a very happy client who I think will stay with us for a long time.

In the end, it was a pretty successful month and with all of the client changes and chaos that we endured, our profit margins didn’t budge a bit. The clients love the flexibility, are happy with us, and we made nice profits without stressing out. So, I’ll say it again, ‘I love hourly rates!’.

It's been about 2 years since I started focusing more and more on Joomla as a CMS and as one of Sagewing's core services. These days, about 50% of our services income is coming from Joomla development and maintenance and there's no end in sight! However, there is one gap in Joomla's functionality that has yet to be neatly filled and that is the lack of a built-in blogging component.

Of course, with no shortage of 3rd party components available for Joomla, it's no problem to piece together a blogging platform and that's exactly what we've done:

• A standard category in Joomla was created for blogging, and sub-categories added as usual. So, the blog is essentially just running as a collection of Joomla articles.
• The DS-Syndicate component was added to handle our RSS feeds. This component allows us to elect which categories go into the feed, and appears to cleanly carry html right into the feed. The component is available at www.joomlafun.com.
• The comments are handled by the JomComment component which as available at www.azrul.com. These excellent programmers provide great support and the component is well written and stable.
• Still missing is a way to allow people to digg or otherwise put an entry onto the many social bookmarking sites. We'll be adding this in once we component selected.

To be fair, there are a few blogging components available for Joomla but these are fairly new and, in our opinion, not quite ready for prime-time. There is also the classic bridge to Wordpress, which is enticing but it just doesn't seem like a good idea to introduce an entirely new application just to handle the blogging.

With more and more clients asking 'how to I do a blog in Joomla' we'll be interested to see how the blog really performs as we add more and more content. Hopefully we'll get some good feedback from our handful of readers se if we can polish up this approach. Your comments welcome!