Eric Ries’s book, The Lean Startup , triggered a new approach to entrepreneurship driven by a fast-moving, iterative, evidence-based approach focused on the ‘minimum viable product’.

It touched a nerve for me personally. In the 90s I ran a computer games company. We didn’t know if a game would be successful until it was released so there was a lot of emphasis on careful design, testing and big brands grab buyers’ attention. We ended up doing games for LEGO, Hasbro and using licences from FIFA, PGA and FIA. It was an expensive business.

The problem was that our projects might take a large team 12-18 months to finish. Because we were locked into these big projects for so long, our ability to learn and change direction was severely limited. It was risk-averse, fault-intolerant and inflexible. To put it another way, it was not an environment that could have produced Angry Birds.

Of course, 20-20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. But I suspect that the problems I had back then are being repeated in IT departments right now.

Since I sold my games company in 2000, I have taken a different approach. Instead of big projects, big teams and big bets, I have tried to operate in a more agile, lean-startup way. I started a marketing company which does great work for great clients. I also started an online business which is now growing rapidly. This is my experience from both sides of the ‘lean’ debate.

• Start small. At the moment, I’m incubating two new businesses, a training company and a neat online utility that makes a popular online project management tool much more usable. Taking the minimum-viable product approach means, in these two cases, spending less than £2,500 each to build a working prototype or website. Starting small doesn’t mean staying small forever. It’s about managing risk and reducing the cost of innovation.
• Agile management. Specifications and plans are very alluring but they can obstruct progress rather than help it. Agile development, as practiced by Pivotal Labs and others, match the lean startup approach very well. By accepting that it isn’t possible to know everything when you start and embracing feedback, this approach makes it much easier to evolve and helps to lift the dead hand of bureaucracy from project management.
• Outsourcing and offshoring. I used to have a big building full of techies and I can remember signing the pay cheques and rent cheques. Ouch! Now, I have a small core of full-time employees, an offshore team of developers and a roster of tried-and-tested contractors. We work virtually and this lets me use the best people wherever they are based without the overhead costs of a fixed base. It also gives me the flexibility to shift resources from one project to another, match costs to revenues and scale up quickly if I need to.
• Portfolio management. Over the past 12 years I’ve killed a couple of businesses that I started, including one that let actors build portfolio sites to promote their careers (it’s a long story!) and an online employee appraisal tool. At the same time, I’ve doubled down on projects that worked, attracted customers and solved real problems for them. I don’t like bet-the-business projects. I prefer to take a dispassionate VC approach to a portfolio of opportunities: pruning here and investing there based on performance rather than unreliable intuition.

Netflix’s corporate culture presentation (described by Sheryl Sandberg as ‘the most important document ever to come out of the Valley’) explains why companies become less innovative as they grow. As departments and responsibilities increase, they believe that the antidote to risk is ever-increasing control, procedures and process. But this drives out talent and suppresses innovation. As Netflix’s experience and Eric Ries suggest, a lean approach to innovation is a better choice. With good people, good management and a trusting culture of creativity and self-discipline, it can be incredibly powerful.

This article, by our CEO Matthew Stibbe, was first published on the The Business Value Exchange from HP, CIO Magazine and IDG.

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Here at Turbine we are big fans of reducing paperwork headaches, and sharing the tips and tricks that make life simpler. And so too, it appears, are the guys at Buffer. They decided to release the pitch deck they used to raise $500,000 for their startup.

“With Buffer, our goal is to take our ideas of transparency for our company to a whole new level. That’s why it was very important for us to make this slide deck public. This slide deck is far from perfect. As previously mentioned, it probably falls into the average category. But it was what at the end of the day helped us raise the funds to turn Buffer into the company it is today.” - Leo Widrich (@leowid), co-founder of Buffer.

So, we thought it was a good idea to help them spread the word, and also say well done to Buffer, for sharing from experience and aiming to help others succeed.

The post A practical pitch deck from the guys at Buffer appeared first on Turbine.

We’re still drawing the rest of that owl on Turbine. Here’s the latest news.

New features

• Managers can now add or delete holiday days from their subordinates’ holiday balance, for example to credit someone for time off in lieu of holiday, and we added settings option for admins to allow this to happen.
• Add textile markup for purchases and expenses footer so you can format that information better.
• Enable three decimal places for company default tax
• Add ability to upload cost centres and budgets via CSV file.

Fixes

• Stopped ICS calendar export revealing time off requests that should not be visible to the user in question.
• More fixes to make it easier to localise the application.
• Filters now work with pagination
• Fix bug when admin can’t edit user profile
• Fix bug about unable to turn off team manager
• Use two digits rounding on the statistics page so that small monthly time off increments are easier to understand
• Fix incorrect displaying of employees’ managers
• Make link to the user profile not clickable for non managers to improve privacy.
• Now employees can’t see teammates time off requests in the list view to improve privacy.
• Fix search field clear bug.

Plus multiple internal changes and refactoring as we get ready for the next big release.

The post Turbine 9.6 release notes appeared first on Turbine.

The post How to draw an owl and the secrets of SaaS pricing appeared first on Turbine.

Monica Vinader is an innovative UK-based company that designs, produces and sells elegant jewellery. We talked to head of operations (and sister to designer Monica) Gabriela Vinader about how she uses cloud-based tools to run and manage their modern and collaborative business.

Monica Vinader describes itself as ‘the brand of choice for elegant and wearable jewellery’. With outlets in Harrods, Liberty and Selfridges, as well as a dedicated store just off Bond Street, it seems they most certainly are.

Monica Vinader regularly receives coverage in magazines like Vogue and Elle, and numerous celebrities have been spotted sporting a Monica Vinader piece. It’s not just the jewellery that’s beautiful though; thanks to Grabriela’s commitment to making the most of modern business technology, its internal operations are pretty stunning too.

Why modernity matters

‘Using cloud-based tools is a no-brainer for me,’ says Gabriela, ‘it’s like if the internet hadn’t been invented and then someone came along and offered it to you – would you use it? Of course you would!’

Monica Vinader faces many of the challenges that are common to small businesses today. The firm has to manage a split head office, with Monica and the design team based in Norfolk, and Gabriela working in London where the majority of their outlets are.

Of the 30+ members of staff, several travel regularly between offices and need to be able to work on the road, and many also work flexibly from home. That means Gabriela has to support multiple devices of every sort and access to information on the go.

‘There are things coming on the market, like Turbine, that make it affordable now,’ says Gabriela. By embracing online tools, Gabriela not only enables remote and flexible working, but since there is no need for a server or dedicated IT staff, she also saves a great deal of money.

Take Turbine for example

Before Turbine, purchase orders at Monica Vinader were ‘a bit of a nightmare.’ Staff would email Gabriela with requests and then she’d enter the request on a spreadsheet and reply with a made-up PO number.

‘It wasn’t really working, and nobody knew what was going on,’ says Gabriela.

Now everybody has an account on Turbine, they can log in and make requests using the suppliers and accounting codes that Gabriela set up when she signed up. Gabriela can simply review and approve requests at the click of a button. Even if she misses an email, she can sign in and see all the requests in one place.

‘It’s just more efficient and cleaner,’ says Gabriela.

Business efficiency? There’s an app for that

When it comes to online apps, Gabriela has taken full advantage of the multitude of services out there that can help small businesses:

• theRota.com helps Gabriela ensure that there are always people on the shop floor and covering their counters in the various department stores. It can automate scheduling and send text messages if the rota is changed.
• Customer service is taken care of with Desk.com, which is a web-based email management tool that has functionality like tagging, time tracking and social media integration
• Gabriela uses Box and Google Drive for back up and sharing files, as people can access them from anywhere, any time
• Google Apps allows real time collaboration on specific documents, and Gabriela has used Google Apps to build a simple company intranet
• She communicate with their website developers using Basecamp, which allows her to track progress and be part of the iterative design and coding process
• Looking to the future, Gabriela is exploring online point-of-sales and inventory apps as well as cloud-based accounting systems

‘We don’t store credit card data or customer information on the cloud,’ says Gabriela, ‘but for everything else it seems pretty obvious.’ Considering online tools like Turbine have saved her time and money whilst making her job easier and her staff happier, it’s easy to see why being a thoroughly-modern Monica Vinader has meant becoming an extremely successful and innovative small business.

The post Streamlining for success: the story of a thoroughly modern Monica Vinader appeared first on Turbine.

Shutl is an innovative UK-based company that lets online shoppers get what they want, when they want it. They’ll deliver your goods within 90 minutes or in a one-hour window of your choice. But how efficient is the company behind the delivery service? We talked to founder and CEO Tom Allason to find out.

Sometimes, when you buy something online you don’t want it tomorrow, or sometime this week. You want to get it now, or at least at a convenient time that fits around your busy lifestyle. Shutl makes that happen.

It’s a delivery service that integrates with online stores, such as Maplin and Argos, to give customers fast, convenient delivery, often in as little as 90 minutes

The cost of Shutl delivery is comparable to standard delivery, meaning in many cases free depending on the retailer and the value of the order. To add to the excitement, you can watch the delivery in real time because Shutl’s couriers have GPS tracking.

Efficiency is their business

Shutl is about more than deliveries. It’s about the shopper’s experience and brand building. ‘We talk about Shutl as part of the retailer’s value proposition, their marketing story and as a way to build the lifetime value of a customer,’ says Tom Allason, Shutl’s CEO. In other words, for e-commerce companies that offer the Shutl option, efficiency is good for business.

Sharing is efficiency

Efficiency is also a business objective within the company. ‘It’s a very agile, transparent environment,’ says Tom. The linkage between the two things – transparency and agility – lets people work more efficiently. If people have the right information, they can make decisions quickly.

So, for example, the company asks every shopper about their Shutl experience and shares the survey results with everyone in the company to keep everyone focused on this key metric. Similarly, the development team doesn’t just show the directors what they’re working on, they do a demo for the whole company.

Turbine takes care of time off

Transparency is important when it comes to routine admin too. This is why Shutl uses Turbine to track who’s in the office and who’s off sick or on holiday. ‘A single view of who’s off and how much holiday time people have is very useful,’ says Tom, ‘and Turbine is very straightforward and easy to use.’

With 35 staff working in offices in Chelmsford, Shoreditch and San Francisco, having a straightforward and easy-to-use tool like this is essential.

Invest in what’s important

It’s a mistake to see Shutl as a kind of courier company. In fact, they are a high-tech software company and their product is their technology, which matches customers, couriers and retailers in real time. With such high-tech DNA, it’s no surprise that they are keen adopters of cloud applications like Turbine.

For example, they use:

• Ruby on Rails as the framework for their software (like Turbine does)
• Amazon Web Services to host their software
• Pivotal Tracker and Trello for project management
• Salesforce for customer relationship management
• Google Apps for email, calendars, word processing, spreadsheets and presentations
• Dropbox for file sharing
• MailChimp for newsletters
• LinkedIn for customer prospecting and research

In true lean startup style, they even used eBay to buy all their office furniture. This combination of frugality and innovation is typical of the most efficient companies. Like Shutl, they spend their money according to their priorities, ruthlessly focusing their investment on tools that help them grow the business. And if that means a second-hand office chair, so be it. It’s a badge of honour.

The post Efficiency is their business: how Shutl stays sharp appeared first on Turbine.

Are you a geek? If you’re asking the question, you probably are – curiosity is the defining characteristic of geeks. But here are 21 more signs that you might have the geek gene.

1. You use a command line interface on a touchscreen device.
2. You watch unboxing videos on YouTube.
3. You like ASCII art.
4. You have more than one monitor on your desk.
5. You modded your camera by jailbreaking the firmware.
6. You say ‘Woot’ in everyday life.
7. You know that a ‘kilo’ means 1024 and not a bag of groceries.
8. You own a Pebble watch.
9. You downloaded the Pebble watchface SDK already.
10. You know that there are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don’t.
11. When no-one’s looking, you hug your MacBook Air.
12. You can argue the merits of BBC Micro vs. Sinclair Spectrum with full recall of the specs.
13. You know what to do in a maze of twisty passages all alike.
14. You write like a hacker (but you can also write for non-geeks).
15. You know what technology wants.
16. You read Charlie’s Diary and Charles Stross’s books.
17. You work 9 to 5 but it’s at night (hat tip: Real programmers don’t use Pascal).
18. Your hero is Steve Wozniak not Steve Jobs.
19. You know GitHub is not a dating site but secretly you wish it was.
20. You read The Nerd Handbook and realised it was about you.
21. You for one welcome our new alien overlords.

(Picture hat tip: Alexander Kjerulf – check out his article How NOT to lead geeks.)

The post Best of the web: 21 sure signs that you’re a geek appeared first on Turbine.

I had a revelation. Calling our customers  ’users’ dehumanises them. It’s the linguistic equivalent of that office scene from The Apartment, reducing individuals to interchangeable units of interaction. It’s very common in IT to talk about ‘users’ and it’s understandable but I think it’s not helpful. From now on, you’re friends, customers, readers, managers, employees, staff – and above all – people.

We’ll be reviewing all the copy on this site and in the application over the coming weeks to make it more personable.

The post Don’t call your customers ‘users’ appeared first on Turbine.

Probably the only useful business lesson you can learn from watching The Apprentice is that a penny saved on purchasing is a penny earned in profits. This article describes how Turbine can help cut purchasing costs.

(Non-useful lessons from The Apprentice include: sucking up to the boss, back-stabbing, bullying, the art of BS, appearing to take responsibility while shifting the blame, giving 110% and stepping up to the plate at all times.)

There are many ways to overspend on purchasing

• Over-ordering
• Keeping too much stock
• Not negotiating
• Not consolidating suppliers
• Delegating too much authority
• Ignoring budgets
• Not checking receivables
• Not checking invoices
• Fraud
• Inadequate paperwork
• Too much paperwork
• Wasting too much time on the whole process

Turbine can help with all these problems. Here’s how.

Order the right amount of stuff

Without proper controls, its very tempting for staff to over-order and keep items on stock. It makes their life easier if they only have to go to the stock room or stationery cupboard and pull out what they need rather than go through the hassle of ordering something from a supplier.

However, large companies have perfected the art of just-in-time stock control. By letting suppliers hold stocks on their premises and on their books, a business can cut their costs considerably. To make this work, you need a system that makes it very easy to order what you need when you need it.

This is where Turbine can help. Any member of staff can complete a purchase order online or on their smart phone in a matter of minutes and managers can review and approve them just as easily. Once a PO has been approved, you can forward it to the supplier by email as a formal order. This cuts the bureaucracy barrier to just-in-time stock control.

Better budgeting

Turbine includes a budgeting feature that lets you track spending against cost centres. This helps you stay on plan. Companies overspend one order at a time and budgeting gives employees and managers immediate warnings if a given request is going to take them over budget.

Consolidate suppliers

Turbine lets companies create a list of approved suppliers. Staff can select those suppliers from a drop down list on a purchase order request.

Although you can give staff the option of creating one-off suppliers, this level of control makes it easier to consolidate spending on chosen suppliers and, in doing so, negotiate better terms such as improved discounts or payment periods. For example, companies can use it to consolidate all their stationery purchases with a single supplier rather than letting staff buy items from the high street at much higher prices.

Negotiate with information

You’ll get a better deal if you negotiate with information. For example, if you can say to a supplier ‘we spent £20,000 with you last year but if we spent that with your competitor, we would get a 5 percent discount – can you match it?’ you’ll get a better response than just demanding a discount. Why? Because you’re being clear about what you’re offering in return.

Turbine lets you search POs by supplier and export them to Excel for detailed analysis. This will give you a clear idea of exactly what you’re buying and who is supplying it.

Centralise purchasing and goods receivable

Turbine gives you the option of routing all your approved POs through a single company buyer. This means you can consolidate requests from different people into one order per supplier and also double-check that the goods are needed and are not available elsewhere in the organisation.

You can also centralise goods receivable so that you can check incoming orders and invoices against the original PO. Did you get what you ordered? Did the supplier meet the agreed terms? By centralising the actual ordering and receiving with Turbine, it’s easier for companies to keep track of stock levels and avoid over-ordering.

Prevent fraud

Unfortunately, fraud can happen. For example, suppliers can give back-handers to staff for ordering goods that never arrive. Employees can pinch goods on arrival before they are logged into a stock control system. Or people can simply order items for their own personal use.

Turbine includes a series of controls to stop accidental or deliberate changes to requests. For example:

• You can set up approval rules so that POs over a certain value must be approved by a manager.
• Each PO has a unique serial number.
• After a PO has been approved, employees cannot edit the quantities.
• You have the option to stop employees creating new suppliers so they can only order from the company-approved list.
• After a PO has been marked received, it is completely locked and archived.
• Every request and state change is recorded with an audit trail so changes and deletions and logged.

Of course, employee vetting, good stock control and other processes are required to reduce the risk of fraud but Turbine’s processes and controls can help a lot.

Take control of paperwork

Companies often overlook a big cost when it comes to purchasing: employee’s time. The longer it takes to request, approve, receive, check and record a purchase order, the more the process costs. Especially when you multiply it by hundreds or thousands of requests each year.

Without Turbine, people waste time filling in forms, waiting for approvals, searching for PO numbers or order information etc. In fact, the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply estimates that the true cost of raising a single PO could be £30-£50. Charles Dominick cites various US sources that put the cost of a purchase order at between $35 and a staggering $741 each. Even if it is just $5, a company can save a huge amount by using Turbine.

Instead of purchase order forms in triplicate or unwieldy, ad-hoc spreadsheets, Turbine has a friendly, easy-to-use web interface and a central database of all PO requests. There’s no duplication, no papers to lose, less chance of making a mistake and no waiting.

Run your purchasing from the beach

Okay, perhaps this is more desirable than realistic. But we have hotels where managers use tablets to order things while making their rounds and trucking companies where drivers use smart phones to order parts while on the road. Many of our clients have multiple locations so Turbine lets them all share the same information without having to install any software or servers. I’m sure that a lot of our clients also use Turbine at home or on their commute to manage their requests.

All you need is a web browser and Turbine to get control of your purchasing. See our FAQ guide to setting up purchasing on Turbine for more information.

The post How to cut your purchasing costs with Turbine appeared first on Turbine.

Another week. Another update! We’re still working on big projects relating to permissions and localisation but this week’s release has some nice improvements, including:

• We moved the staff handbook pages to a new handbook menu at the top.
• The dashboard now has a request button so you can create new requests right there.
• When you export requests to a CSV file, it includes links back to the original request so you can check details without having to search for them.
• Improvements to the new trial experience, including better help and improved trial expiration emails.
• We also fixed a bug which stopped some reminder emails being sent out.

The post Turbine Version 9.5 release notes – improved staff handbook appeared first on Turbine.