The time between Christmas and New Year’s Day is an ideal opportunity to take a break and close the office down for a few days; this gives both you and your staff some time to relax and enjoy the fruits of all the hard effort you’ve put in throughout the year.

This sounds easier than it might be in reality, however there are a few tricks to help pass that message on to your clients:

• Give plenty of notice. Email clients with active projects now, letting them know that you’ll be closed over Christmas. Encourage them to provide everything they need, in order to wrap up the job, or alternatively, ensure you have enough leeway in that project’s plan to allow a week’s delay.
• Reassure them about emergencies. A client’s first thought will often be “what happens if my web site goes down?” In the same notice above, confirm that while closed, someone will be keeping an eye on the web servers, just in case. That’s assuming, of course, you’ve delegated that to one of your team.
• Encourage your clients to also take the time off. People burn out — it’s a fact. We all need a break once in a while to perform at our best. Not only will your clients be refreshed, they can’t criticize you for doing the same!
• Point out that this is the only office closure each year — assuming that’s the case, of course. Most offices, you’ll find, only ever close down during the Christmas period. Easter consists of public holidays, yet those eight or so days over Christmas and New Year’s Day are a fantastic chance to really unwind.
• Remind your clients closer to the date again. People forget, things change, and although six weeks out is a great forewarning, you need to follow this up again. I suggest about a week before closing, send out an email to say Merry Christmas, and let them know your official closing and opening hours.
• Provide any emergency numbers they may need as well, however I’m a big believer in just diverting the office number, if you can manage it.

This year, for example, Christmas falls on a Thursday. My business is closing shop entirely from that day through to January 4th, making a total of eleven days off from work! This equates to only four actual business days, taking out weekends, and public holidays in Australia. Our clients won’t even notice, but my staff and their families sure will!

This post first appeared as part of Issue 422 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

Dave Greiner co-founded Freshview in 2004 with his long-time mate, Ben Richardson. Dave is the design half of the founding partnership, and is responsible for the UI of their products. When not obsessing about form layouts, he’s known to obsess about over-hit backhand slices in table tennis.

Hi Dave, the story of Ben and yourself creating an email campaign solution is inspiring. Can you give us the 30 second history lesson here?

Back in 2004, we were running our own small web design shop. Business was going well, and lots of our clients started approaching us to send email newsletters for them. The search began for the right email marketing software to handle this side of the business — but all the tools we tried were either missing key features or were bloated and impossible to use.

Quite quickly we realized there was a genuine opportunity here to build an email marketing tool just for the web design industry. By late 2004, the first version of Campaign Monitor was launched. Fast forward to today and we’ve got 15 staff and tens of thousands of designers in more than 100 countries using our software, running email campaigns for themselves and their clients. It’s been a wild ride.

So, given you previously charged for services (time), and now are making money based on product, you would have a great insight into both spheres. What are the pros and cons for going to product-based sales, versus the grind of hourly billing?

I think it ultimately comes down to the type of person you are and the things you enjoy. Some people love the idea of working on a new project every week for a different client. I’ve been working on the same project for four years and still love what I do.

Personal preference aside though, the most obvious and important difference between product and time-based work is scale. I’d much rather be surfing than working; so, when I’m working, I want it to be as productive as possible.

When you’re charging by the hour, it’s much harder to grow your bottom line without growing your head count. By selling a product, especially a self-service product over the Web, you can double your business without having to work harder or hire more people. That’s a fairly significant pro, in my opinion.

You managed to gain great traction in the early days, with little spent on advertising. What do you attribute that success to?

I think the biggest factor behind our early success was that we built for a specific niche instead of trying to please everybody. By creating a tool just for web designers, we could build unique features perfect for the industry that nobody else was offering.

Just before launching, we approached some well-known designers for their feedback on the software. A number of them were kind enough to write glowing reviews on their blog, and it all started from there.

Another area we focused on, and still focus on, is the idea of promotion through education. We gave away as much knowledge as we could through articles and other free resources; this helped establish us as experts in the email design field and gained us a lot of free attention in the industry we were targeting.

If there was a simple tip you could suggest for anyone considering starting a product rather than relying on service income, what would it be?

Don’t be afraid to do both for a while. We built Campaign Monitor on the side a couple of days a week while we spent the rest of our time working for clients. It might take a little longer, but it also means you’re mitigating most of the risk involved in a new venture.

If I can sneak a second tip in, it would be to make things easy on yourself by charging for your software. If it adds value, people will be willing to pay for it.

Who doesn’t want to work at Freshview? Ping pong, free lunches, surfboards — you have a great philosophy there. What lessons have you learned along the way? (Oh, and when can I start?)

Our work philosophy wasn’t really a big strategic decision for us. It actually came down to our own expectations. This is where we spend the majority of our days, it’s our time away from the things we really enjoy doing. It better be fun.

To keep the balance right, we have a work environment where you can choose how distracted you want to be. All our developers have big offices so they can really dig in and get things done when they need to. But we also have break-out areas where you can play some ping pong , grab a free snack, and generally hang out.

We also try to get out of the office for things totally unrelated to work, like surfing lessons, lawn bowls, and go-carting. We always find we get the best out of our team if they’re spending some office time away from a monitor.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 424 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.

Christmas is just around the corner, and whether you celebrate it or not, the event happens to coincide nicely with the end of the calendar year — a great time to thank those who have supported your business over the last twelve months.

Not only that, but a well-timed Christmas message may end up reviving a waning business relationship. Given we’re halfway through November, we’d need to work fast to meet printing and postal deadlines, or alternatively, build an electronic Christmas message, if that’s preferred.

Let’s look at options. The traditional Christmas card is still well received. There are a few rules with these, though:

• Try to opt for your own professionally-designed company Christmas card, so that it’s unique to your business (and there’s no risk of a competitor sending the same image!)
• For the personal touch, hand-sign rather than print signatures in the card.
• It’s better to send earlier rather than later. Leaving it until December 20th isn’t a wise move. Ideally, the card should arrive in the first week of December.
• Cards should fly solo, rather than share the envelope with extra marketing material that makes the card less genuine.
• It’s fine to include a logo, but keep it small or put it on the back so that it’s not the main focus.
• If you must resort to off-the-shelf cards, buy them through a charity who uses the profits to help others.
• Consider a different concept, such as the products MOO offer, with varying shapes and an individual touch.

Electronic cards are great as well, and are considerably better for the environment. They do, however, suffer from low open rates, and may get read by people other than those it was actually intended for. Indeed, it’s possible less people will see it, compared to the paper versions which tend to sit in office reception areas, being read by all in the weeks leading up to the break.

If you do send an ecard, consider using email campaign software; it can provide a text version if required and track email open rates. There are plenty of options available on the market.

When designing that email card, consider your audience wisely, as well as the technical limitations of email. To see which email clients support what CSS, have a gander at the Email Standards Project web site.

Prefer to send something more substantial? There’s always the usual bottle of wine or gift hamper. Perhaps consider trying some branded promotional gear, such as USB flash drives with your logo, or similar.

Make sure though, that you either buy quality products or forget it. There’s nothing worse than spending all year building a reputation for quality, only to damage it by sending some cheap pen that never works, or has your logo printed badly on the side.

It’s unfortunate, but clients will remember it — more often than the times you worked all night to get a web site live for them.

This post first appeared as part of Issue 422 of the SitePoint Tribune, a very popular email newsletter that I am co-editor of. Thanks to SitePoint for allowing me to reproduce the work here.