For those of you who are following us and keeping up with our company history, you know that we’ve setup a remote work environment and that we don’t have a physical office space any more. We mostly work virtually.

We’re using technology to communicate, collaborate, and achieve a lot! In particular, we use a bunch of web applications to do what we need to do and share what we want to share – some of them we’ve developed ourselves, some we’ve bought, and some are free. Project management, task management, time tracking, file sharing, chat, are just a few examples of what we handle through web apps.

But sometimes all these tools and technology just defeat the purpose. It kinda gets in the way. When you have a bunch of things you need done, but you don’t necessarily need to cooperate on these things, or track the time you spend on them, or be particularly organized, then there’s nothing better than a good old quick text document you use temporarily and discard when you’re done. As an example, here’s my to-do list from last Sunday (08/07): (more…)

In the United States, Post Office employees have a bad reputation. They’re notoriously unfriendly, cold, hostile and unhelpful. It’s hard to avoid feeling frustrated when you have to deal with arrogant staff – be it an employee of the Post Office, an abusive police officer, or a flight attendant who’s running his own little power trip on the passengers.

But then I ask myself – wouldn’t you also become angry, frustrated and bitter if you had a crappy job at a crappy organization? The work environment and the context you create within your company plays a major role in your staff’s happiness and professional satisfaction, which in turn is crucial to make your customers happy.

The Post Office doesn’t have a good context that would allow its employees and agents to thrive and be happy. And the atmosphere of bitterness spreads to the customers who don’t receive friendly customer service. If only you could be nice to people, they would put up with long waiting lines, complicated rules, and even expensive service! If the clerk apologizes for the wait and take the time to provide good customer service, that would make all the difference.

It’s so important to create a great company context where the members of your organization can strive and be happy. (more…)

While building Noam Design and helping other businesses take off, I’ve learned a thing or two about entrepreneurship and about developing a business. Here are 6 mistakes I find particularly hard for entrepreneurs to avoid: (more…)

When starting a business, you often have to juggle between tasks and roles. One day you’re the project manager and the next you’re the billing department guy. Of course that’s totally fine – and you should be proud of taking care of so many different things. If you’re a one man show – enjoy it while it lasts and promote yourself as such.

But as time goes by and your company grows stronger, you’ll want to focus on what you do best and enjoy the most while delegating the other tasks to people who are a better fit for them. (more…)

If your company’s offering is unique – your language should reflect that uniqueness and be original as well.

In fact that could be a great way to check if your business (or business idea if it’s still just an idea) is solid. Just read what you write about it – if it sounds banal, there’s a good chance you should consider readjusting the business concept altogether. (more…)

Promoting a product by focusing on what that product is not is a bad practice. When talking about your product, don’t say what your product is not – instead tell your prospect customers what your product is!

Instead of mentioning “no commitment required” try “you can cancel anytime” or something like that. Of course there are some exceptions but in most cases it’s a better, more open and useful strategy to describe your product in a positive way.

I see a lot of food chains promoting healthy food by mentioning what the product isn’t -  like “no hormones”, “no animal by products”, or “no dangerous pesticides”. Well that doesn’t tell me a lot about what the product actually is… you may not use hormones and a long list of other “bad” things but you may very well use tons of other stuff I don’t want to eat. Stuff you don’t mention in your list of what your product doesn’t have. And I’ve notice that this is often the case: when a company focuses on what their product isn’t instead of openely describing what the product actually is, there’s often some hidden stuff.

When looking for a chicken, I’d like to see something clear that describes what the product is. Something like “humanely cared for chicken free to feed and pasture around our organic farm”.

I spent the month of March traveling in Costa Rica and though it was pretty much business as usual during that time I didn’t write any new posts while I was away.  Blogging can be really easy but when you drink fresh coconut water all day, your priorities end up naturally changing!

All the hard work we’ve done over a period of a few months before I left really paid off. By putting together our virtual office setup and our remote work environment, we created a context that made it possible for me to travel without compromising on our company work. I’ve learned a lot in the process and I’ll make sure to share with you here how we setup our virtual office, which tools we’re using, and how we now get better work done than ever  before. So make sure to grab the RSS feed or to follow us on Twitter

Everyday while in Costa Rica I spent some time working on my laptop at internet cafes near where I was staying at the time. I was collaborating with my team mates, communicating with customers, and getting great work done! Working and traveling can definitely co-exist – you just need to have the right tools.

Here at Noam Design, we’re big fans of keeping teams small and hiring “managers of one“. Here is a fun short slideshow that can help understand how and why many companies grow big teams:

Finding a good web host is no easy task! There are so many options out there that you could spend days, if not weeks, researching the industry, comparing web hosting companies, reading reviews, and trying out different hosting services.

Luckily for you we’ve worked with dozens of hosting companies over the years, and we have some good suggestions! (more…)

If you’re wondering why we suddenly slowed down posting awesome posts on our blog, it’s because things have been particularly hectic here and the company is going through a lot of great changes! I’ll make sure to post about our evolution, the lessons learned, etc… But for now I thought it’d be appropriate to share a great tool that makes blogging super easy!

Posterous is a dead simple way to blog. When you’re particularly swamped with work or other things, that doesn’t mean you should stop your company’s social networking efforts! All you have to do is email - check it out