Kevin Cullis: How to Start a Business Mac Version

As a startup entrepreneur you’re always on the lookout for ways of serving more customers at each chance you get, whether it’s through marketing, generating leads, sales, or just plain ol’ helping someone else out. It’s about earning more than a starving artist’s wage. But as with any business, there is the craft of your business that you love to do and then there is the business of your craft, how to make money doing what you love to do.

Having said that, there are a number of quotes that I’d like to share:

• Never hand an ill workman good tools.
• An ill labourer quarrels with his tools.

So, what do these mean? A poor technician, i.e. workman, artist, writer, etc. makes excuses for the tools they use in getting the required results. It’s the same as saying that buying a great word processor will make you a good or even great writer. Not quite.

A good word processor (the tool) makes the task of writing easier, but it does not make your writing (your skill) any better. Whether it’s a book an author is producing or a graphic by an artist, it takes work and talent, using good brushes to do oil paintings with or using a good saw to finely and precisely cut wood. If you don’t know how to use them well, i.e. your talent or skills, it won’t make the results any better.

Apple is a tool maker

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For those that don’t know my story, here’s an interview I did with an author, Morgen Bailey, in the United Kingdom about how I got started writing my book and my blog. As you’ll see, we all take different paths to get where we are today and sometimes the myths and gossip of what happens creates a fog around the truth of what really takes place.

So, read what transpired for me to take up writing a book.

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Apple has been granted a new patent for it’s iWork Numbers application. You might want to take a look at it.

It relates to when you want to copy data into a new chart that the new data is associated with the old data into a new data set.

That’s business.

Related articles

• Apple nabs 16 more patents for multi-touch, solar power, iWork (zdnet.com)
• Apple nabs more patents for multitouch, iWork (news.cnet.com)

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As an entrepreneur you either have time or have money, but usually not both. Later on as your business grows you’ll trade time for money by allowing others to do things they are better at than you are to free you up to do what you do best. But in the beginning if you don’t have the money then you have to do things yourself. But how can you save yourself time and money? Let’s take a look.

Buy Templates. You can take a look at Brad Gosse’s magazine templates and purchase them and make the adjustments you need and then create the documents. He has some great ideas and flair for this thing called marketing. Getting his templates will save you time, especially as low the price is for them.

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When it comes to an idea to start a business, even start a Mac business, the first step is the idea of starting a business. Usually the idea comes from a number of perspectives or reasons: seeing an idea that solves a problem, the need to want to make more money, the desire to use all of ones talents rather than the limitation of working in a “cubicle nation,” or even wanting to do something different with ones life. Whatever the reason, they all surround the main reason of WHY. Why do you want to start a business?

The steps needed to start a business are as follows

1. Why? What is the real reason for wanting to start your business?
2. Business Basics. Understanding the purpose of a business, i.e. solving a problem that someone is willing to pay money for your solution. It means there is the craft of your business and the business of your craft. Much like being a writer. You’re a writer, but there’s the business surrounding your writing, graphic artist surrounded by the business of graphic art, law and the business of being a lawyer, etc.
3. Business Research. Doing the necessary research into getting your product marketable and salable to your customers. Are there others that are doing what you’re doing? How will you do things differently, separating  yourself from the pack?
4. Business Plan. Business planning is about analyzing your business idea, i.e. crunching the numbers, to see if you can make a profit out of it. Making sales without making a profit means you’ve worked for nothing. It goes back to #2 above, but here’s where missing out how to calculate how you’ll make a profit, including covering for any sick days that you might have, medical insurance, etc., can cost you a pretty penny. As we use to say in the USAF, prior planning prevent poor performance. A suggested product is IONFreshStart.com‘s Business Planning templates made for Apple’s iWork.
5. Action or Project Plan. Once the planning for the Go/No Go decision is done, whether or not you’re willing to go forward with your business idea, now you need to put action to the financial questions and get it done.
6. Mac Software. What Mac software will help you with your business? Here, too often, the typical new business owner wants to “buy big” for the future or “wants what everyone else has” so that they can be “compatible with those they work with.” It comes down to this question: do you want to share information or  collaborate with others? You can share a PDF of information with others, but if you need for others to work with you on something, look at whether or not the software can use the same file format or not.
7. Mac Hardware. Once you have decided on the software that you need to run your business the next step is to decide which Mac to run it on, whether you need power, portable, or price conscious. Power refers to desktops, portable means laptops, price means the Mac Mini.
8. Marketing. It’s about getting your name out for your customers to find you. As it has been said by others, 10% of your effort is in getting your product to market, the other 90% is marketing. You will not stop this part.
9. Sales. Once your customers know who and what you do, it’s a matter of selling them what you offer. It is also a matter of listening to your customer and adjusting your product to keep and gain more customers.
10. Operations. Here’s where the rubber meets the road. If you can’t run your business cost effectively, even frugally, then you won’t make any money. If you love what you do, that’s one thing, but if you can’t run a cost effective operation you wont’ make money at it.

There you have the steps. If you want more detail, you can purchase my book, How to Start a Business: Mac Version because I go into much more detail as to how to get started. Or click on the book cover on the top right and order one today.

As an entrepreneur, startup, and Mac user I can attest that using Apple’s iWork Pages you CAN write a book with it. Why?

Because I’ve done it. And so have some others.

First, take a look at my efforts in writing my first book, How to Start a Business: Mac Version and you’ll see how good Pages can perform producing a print ready file. If I can do it, so can you.

If you want to learn what it took, you can read the guest blog posts #1-8 at Heinlein Group or go to my book page and just below the Scribd.com image on the same page are all eight blog posts that I have written. You’ll find what I learned about the whole publishing process.

The ease of which you can get a book published compared with years ago makes the barrier much lower. Make the book look like you want it to, upload a PDF of the interior file and the book cover and you’re done.

However.

It means that you need to do a good job of producing a very good to great book, otherwise, your writing and publishing efforts will be worthless.

If you have questions, ask away. Be glad to answer your questions.

As an entrepreneur and startup business I’m always on the lookout for what’s next. Not necessarily being an innovator or early adopter, but one that uses certain Mac tools to get my work done and of those tools that I use, wanting to know and watch for when the next version comes out is important.

This means that I use iWork to handle all of my word processing, page layout, spreadsheet, and presentation software needs, including finishing up my upcoming book “How to Start a Business: Mac Version” completely done in iWork Pages. But let’s get to the root of this blog post.

iWork ’10 is coming out soon!

Why do I say that? Because there are a few things that point to this conclusion.

1. The current version is iWork ’09, a year and a half since the last release.
2. The last update to iWork Pages (4.0.3) was late last year, i.e. updates and bug fixes, none since, and there are still bugs that need to be fixed.
3. The iPad came out in April ’10 and came with iWork for the iPad. Steve wanted this to be his baby, so everything has been put on hold until this came out. Including updates to iWork, since they’re both now sharing info.
4. There is an iWork for the iPad feedback page.
5. Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) is June 7-11, 2010.
6. The iPad has been released, but work on updating is to make it “perfect” continues.

I’m speculating that either iWork ’10 is released, or at least an announcement of a release, at WWDC.

I’m hoping for the release and availability that week. Now, whether Steve does a Keynote of iWork, that remains to be seen, but unless it’s a striking new approach or version, it will only take up a small amount of Steve’s keynote.

So, what am I hoping for in this new release? Here’s my list:

1. (See below comments) Save a Pages document in an epub file format for creating books for the iBook Store. This is almost a given, if it’s not there, shame on Apple for missing it.
2. Based on the above comment, better sharing between the Mac and iPad documents.
3. More book tools in Pages, such as creating an Index, one button drop caps, etc. for creating more compelling styled books and selling them on the iBook store.
4. A one menu “upload to the iBook store” command in the Share menu in Pages that once your iBook store account has been loaded into preferences it’s as easy as 1-2-3 for uploading and selling your books.
5. A smaller memory footprint. This is based on the work Apple has done with the iPad and getting iWork to work with limited iPad hardware resources.
6. More “charts” types based on the data you want to show in both Pages and Numbers.
7. More integration with MobileMe, i.e. collaboration with iWork.com
8. More finer controls over the text and images in Pages. Again, the iBook store will be driving these features.

What I would love to see? In no particular order:

• All of the above suggestions.
• A few more book and text and header type fonts. If Steve took a typography class and it made an impression on him, shouldn’t there be more since he’s trying to change the publishing industry?
• Both improved color and black texture themes of charts and graphics.
• A much improved Font Book experience. Again, if Steve loves what he learned about typography, Font Book needs a radical update so that you can use fonts better as a designer.
• iWork has a color wheel, it needs a grayscale texture wheel for simple black and white books.

So, what do you think will happen at WWDC and iWork?

Update 06/07/2010: Well, no iWork released OR announced by Steve at the Keynote. Too much iPad and iPhone. From here Apple will either quietly release it or have another announcement sometime late summer or fall timeframe, probably guessing in mid September, if that late. There are three scenarios here:

1. Apple Store show up. This is where there is not much significance to what it is and appears on Apple’s online store.
2. Short Announcement. A guess would be that there might be, at the most, a shorter announcement IF there is something significant about the release, i.e. works enough with MobileMe and other aspects that it needs a release announcement.
3. Larger Announcement. If a number of publishers are on board with what iWork can do with the iBook store, etc. But from my vantage point there’s probably a lot of “back room” goings on such as improving MobileMe, etc. now that the iPad/iPhone has been announced and this will start taking up resources.

Update 06/07/2010 #1: Well, Engadget has a story that Keynote for the iPhone 4 is coming based on a screen shot, which means iWork is coming soon as well. My guess is that once they work good together, maybe not great, iWork ’10 will be released. Stay tuned for more info.

Update 07/21/2010: My guess is that Apple won’t release iWork ’10, or whatever they call it, until any new models come out in the fall after the current sales are up, sometime during middle of September or later.

Update 08/26/2010: Apple released today and Update to iWork 9.0.4 that adds a few fixes AND a new export feature to the epub format. I nailed this feature above.

Update: 01/23/2011: Rumor is that iWork ’11 will come out sometime Spring, maybe March or April because a proposed book on iWork ’11 has been delayed. Soon, folks, soon.