Right tools can build big business in a box
Not too long ago, in order to build a business, you needed a physical location, a product, employees, some stationery, several hundred thousand dollars in capital and 10 years of hard work. But thanks to Mac, this is much easier now.
I started a new publishing company last month. The key investment was an idea, my Mac, some software and a few weeks. The business is the result of a fund-raising idea I developed in connection with the Marine Technology Society, of which I am a member.
We wanted to raise money for educational scholarships. So I asked members (mostly marine scientists and engineers) to send me short stories of their ocean adventures.
The collection aimed to inspire students to consider marine science as a career, but the society also wanted to compile true adventure stories to entertain.
The result (created on a Mac) is a book called The Spark in the Sea. As lovely as it is, the book is useless as a fund-raiser without a business to promote and distribute it. This is where Mac modern business models come in.
Though technology has not yet evolved to 'a complete business in a box', we have advanced to where one or two people can do everything with about six boxes, provided they take advantage of the help available.
I used the following tools and secrets to launch this business. Contributors wrote the stories on various word processors on different operating systems, but the editing and basic formatting was done in Microsoft Word on my Mac.
The document was put into QuarkXPress, and designed and formatted in that application. Photos went in via a UMAX scanner, sized and tweaked in Photoshop, converted to 300 dots per inch TIF files, and added to the QuarkXPress file.
Maps and line art were created in Macromedia FreeHand while the cover was built and left in Photoshop format for tweaking by the printer.
To market the book we created a website ww.homeplanetbooks.com) that a friend constructed for us with Macromedia Dreamweaver and then we notified all the search engines of our existence with VST's application, Be Found, which is a search engine notifier. An OS X version of the application is not available but it works in Classic mode.
To take money from our website customers we needed a shopping cart, which our site host supplied. We opened a checking account at our bank and a merchant account at another bank that provided us with credit-card processing.
We set up accounting in MYOB's FirstEdge, the light version of its Account Edge application. FirstEdge does not have payroll or inventory management but it is easy enough for non-accountants to use on a day-to-day basis.
Of course, that is not all there is to building a business. Marketing is a creatively demanding and continuous effort. We published press releases using the Microsoft Office template and sent it to all industry publications.
We also applied to have the book stocked and sold at Amazon.com, and distributed through literary distribution houses.
This was all done by e-mail and internet research. In our first week, we sold 100 copies of the book.
We expect to break even and start generating income for the society's education programmes in the next year.
I would be glib if I suggested that my Mac did all the work. It did not. But it did empower me to create a thus-far successful business with just an idea, some software and a few volunteers. It was done in a short time and for very little money.
