In response to the increase in mobile users, and to coincide with ShareFile’s mobile strategy, we have recently released mobile apps for Android and iOS (optimized tablet applications soon on the way). The applications allow customers to access their files on-the-go and even save downloads in a convenient folder on the account. We have seen and incredible adoption rate as more offices are going mobile. One ShareFile user says, “Fantastic app. One less reason to sit through start up on the PC. +1 for the Mobile Office.” Another user says, “Great app- the ability to manage users as well as files is superb.”

We will continue to develop innovative features to make our service as seamless as possible for our customers.

Android user? Click here to download.
Apple user? Download the app right from the iTunes store.

Laura Wants Your Resume

The sales philosophy of ShareFile stems from our mission and is therefore fundamentally committed to honesty and service. We call people to tell them about ShareFile knowing that in just a couple years ShareFile has already been hugely beneficial to over 2,000,000 people around the world.

Interested in becoming a Sales Executive at ShareFile? Head over to our hiring section and submit a resume.

While on hold, Adrienne enjoys jamming out to the music playing in the sales area here at ShareFile. She tells me that “Hip-Hop Fridays” are her favorite! In between prospecting, Adrienne performs a couple of morning demos with interested AEC prospects. Before the demo, she researches the company, which gives her the ability to focus the presentation on their needs, while formulating a solution for the company’s file transfer concerns.

“When I entered sales, I was under the impression that a client rarely got back in touch with the salesperson after the sale: client likes product, client buys product, client and salesperson go their separate ways. Once I started at ShareFile, I started noticing myself and other colleagues receiving positive messages from clients about the ShareFile service. Things like, ‘I really love ShareFile and it is doing wonders for my workflow’. After hearing feedback like this regularly, you can’t help but truly want to get the ShareFile name out there and help others in the same fashion.”

Adrienne enjoys maintaining relationships with her clients to make sure ShareFile continues to meet and exceed their expectations by always keeping an open stream of communication. The afternoon generally consists of more prospecting along with a few more afternoon demonstrations, followed by a quick game of ping pong with a few colleagues. Adrienne can be seen wearing her Snuggie around the office. Generally, the Sales team works later hours to accommodate schedules for customers and prospects in various time zones, always with the number one goal of raising the bar for customer service in the technology sector.

Want to become a ShareFile Sales Executive? Head over to our hiring section and submit a resume.

“I think that the concept of uniqueness is highly overrated when it comes to business ideas. Many aspiring entrepreneurs, especially students, feel they need to come up with a totally unique idea and if they later find someone already doing it, they give up. There is no need to be afraid of competitors as long as you have a clear path for acquiring customers and generating revenue. What you should really be afraid of is coming up with a totally new idea that no one actually wants to buy/use.”

He also believes that the time to start a business is when you are young and do not have some of the constraints that come with getting older.

“I would say that the least risky time to start a business is while you’re in school. As a student you can work on a business without needing to make a big salary, so the downside to starting a business in college is very small. In the worst case your business will fail, but you’ll still have some great experience that will help you get a job after graduation.”

Read the full interview with Jesse here.

For small businesses, it is essential to integrate your social media marketing tools in order to become the “voice” behind your brand. Ever heard that saying “there is strength in numbers”? Now take this and apply it to your social media efforts. By having a number of Twitter and/or Facebook followers, a sense of “proof” is offered to potential customers about your product/service. Also, if your company has a blog, it is helpful to leverage content from a blog post to your social network pages.

Small businesses must engage in social networking sites by posting frequently in an effort to retain followers. If it is not possible to have someone post often, schedule your tweets. There are several tools out there to help easily manage social media engagement. Apps such as TweetDeck, Argyle Social and CoTweet allow you to manage the social media process by tracking conversation trends and increasing visibility, which is essential for small businesses.

Social media provides the power to build an online community for your brand. If small businesses actively engage with their online community, they can build more referrals. The more engaged a business is with social media, the more up to date it will be on news within the industry as well. Businesses should use this as an opportunity to own conversations and respond to customers and prospects in real time.

These are just a few tips to leverage social media in marketing efforts and increase overall presence in the online community.

Be sure to follow ShareFile on Twitter and Facebook.

While we use these terms primarily to describe a type of person, I would have to say that there are some things that anyone who works directly with customers on a daily basis should always be practicing, regardless of their personality. It may be hard to become friendlier or to develop good problem solving skills on demand, but even people who display a high level of the traits listed above can work on three related practices and attitudes that can make a big difference in your ability to better serve clients:

In addition to being friendly, be flexible: Everyone has to deal with a difficult person from time to time. It’s possible to get frustrated, and that’s certainly fair. However, your next client doesn’t know what else is going on at your office, and they’d like to be treated like their own person. Being able to let go of whatever else is going on and focus just on your client for a time allows you to be much more helpful. This is something that I think that we all intend to do, but on a busy day, it’s good to keep this goal in mind.

In addition to being patient, be honest: It’s good to be patient when helping people, but it’s better to help them understand exactly what to expect so that they can be patient with the process as well. This often means proactively offering information, such as why a company policy is in place, or the actual timeframe that it may take to see a solution or refund that’s requested. If they have an objection to your explanation or estimate, you can address that with them immediately. Even if you can’t give them the answer that they want, this is invariably preferable to trying to help someone who is already frustrated because their problem wasn’t corrected when they expected it.

In addition to being good at problem solving, be an advocate for the client: This applies to anyone who is in direct contact with customers but may not always be the person most able to actually, physically fix their problem. For example, some software problems or questions have to be escalated to support engineers by ShareFile customer service reps. When an issue is forwarded to someone else, it doesn’t have to be entirely out of your hands. Following up internally and making sure that your client’s concerns remain a priority is sometimes the best problem solving that you can offer the client.

Here are a few of the most recent articles I found interesting.

Beyond the Basics: Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts: Local Raleigh marketing and PR veteran Brian McDonald interviews Gregory Ng from Brooks Bell Interactive about how to effectivly use Twitter to manage multiple accounts. This is a very relevant topic for many businesses as they struggle to understand the quickly changing social media landscape.

How to Work in an Office: 37Signals founder Jason Fried presented at a recent TedX event on why the office isn’t a good place to get work done.

Newsletter segmented testing increases clicks by 40%: Brooks Bell Interactive has an amazing case study on how segmented testing can help increase the click-thru-rate of newsletters. Some great information is included. (Case study requires name and email for access).

Gowalla Turns the Tables, Integrates With Foursquare: Location based marketing tool Gowalla has updated and added the ability to check-in using Facebook Places and Foursquare as well as their own service. While location based tools are gaining an increased use, businesses (both b2b and b2c) are struggling to figure out a way for the service to drive sales.

Q&A with McDonald’s Director of Social Media Rick Wion: A Q&A with the McDonald’s social media director.

Indeed, this cowboy mentality is glorified by many venture capitalists, blogs and publications that cover entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this article is to present a dissenting opinion. While others are encouraging you to drop out of school and try to become the entrepreneurial equivalent of the next big rock star, I am the practical voice who tells you that “Most musicians barely make minimum wage, spend your time studying instead.”

At first this advice may sound kind of depressing (maybe that explains why I have not yet been invited to speak at any graduations). The good news is that it’s also liberating. Most aspiring entrepreneurs make things much harder on themselves than they need to. They rack their brains hoping to come up with the next Facebook, a totally new blockbuster idea with a special competitive advantage to keep [insert name of billion dollar tech company here] from duplicating it.

My advice is to do the exact opposite. Pick a business that has established demand and entrenched competitors. Choose something simple that you are passionate about and can do well. Then, focus on execution. Finally, select a business idea that can succeed on a small scale even if it doesn’t hit it big. Before I lay out these rules more formally, I would like to begin with an example of exactly the type of idea I’m talking about: Pizza.

While in college at Ball State, John Schnatter worked at Greek’s Pizzeria delivering pizzas in Muncie, Indiana. Shortly after graduating in 1983, Schnatter decided to start his own pizza delivery business. There were no shortage of pizza joints in Indiana (or just about anywhere in the world for that matter), but John felt that the quality of pizza was generally pretty low and figured he could make better tasting pizza by using fresh ingredients. He purchased $1,600 worth of used restaurant equipment and opened a pizza delivery business out of an old broom closet in his father’s tavern. His pizza was well liked by customers and a year later he opened his first full restaurant, called Papa John’s Pizza.

Today Papa John’s has over 3,100 locations. Its stock is publicly traded on NASDAQ (PZZA) with a market capitalization of over 650 million dollars. Schnatter owns 30% of the company, making his share of Papa John’s worth over $215 million.

Papa John’s is one of many great examples of companies that grew successfully by following the two simple rules (and three corollaries to those rules) outlined below.

Rule #1: Pick a business idea that can succeed on a small scale

Statistically, we know that very few businesses will reach a valuation above 100 million dollars. You may be the exception, but most likely you’re not. To hedge your bets, try to tweak your business idea so that it can succeed on a small scale even if it never reaches its full potential. If you have to pull the safety parachute on your business and you only end up with a ten million dollar or million dollar business, you’ll walk away with some great experience. Plus, you’ll have a nice financial cushion to allow you to swing for the fences on your next venture if you want to.

Papa John’s definitely followed rule #1. John Schnatter’s business could have been as small as a single location and still could’ve run profitably and successfully, yet it had the scalability to grow to hundreds or thousands of locations or anywhere in between.

Corollary to Rule #1: Choose a business idea that can launch with minimal funding

If your business idea requires a lot of outside funding to get started, it will be extremely difficult to succeed on a small scale and therefore violates Rule #1. Investors (rightfully) want a healthy return on their money, and if you raise a lot of money, you’re pretty much taking the possibility of a small exit off the table. Because of the size of their funds, venture capitalists typically need to invest millions of dollars in each deal otherwise they would have hundreds or thousands of companies in their portfolio. This is too cumbersome to manage, so small exits don’t really make sense for them.

John Schnatter’s first pizza oven only cost him $1,600 and he was able to open his first store by selling his Chevy Camaro, pictured below (after becoming a multi-millionaire he was able to track down and buy back the exact same Camaro he sold in the early 80s).

This corollary does not imply that a business should never take on outside investment. The key phrase is “can launch with minimal funding”. Once your business has launched and succeeded on a small scale, it may become clear that it has the potential for large scale success and needs outside funding to get to the next level. I’m sure at some point (maybe around 10 or 20 stores) it became clear to John Schnatter that his business had the potential to go national or even global.

Rule #2: Enter an Established Market

Starting a business is hard enough without having to worry about whether there is even a market for your idea. Every once in a while, a truly new idea hits the market and succeeds. More often than not, though, successful businesses are incremental improvements on existing businesses.

When Papa John’s launched, one element of the business plan that they did not need to scrutinize was whether people were willing to pay money for pizza. If Schnatter instead had an idea for being the first provider of pizza-flavored milkshakes delivered right to your door, he could have executed the idea perfectly and still (probably) would have failed. Instead, he just needed to worry about making pizza that tasted really good and was delivered reliably for a good price.

Corollary to Rule #2: Your business should have existing competitors

This corollary is pretty simple. If you enter an established market, by definition there will be at least one direct competitor. It’s OK to have your own twist on your product or service offering, but when you launch a business there should be at least one other company doing pretty much what you are doing.

Second corollary to Rule #2: Focus on execution

If you are entering an established market, your competitive advantage is not going to come from a big new idea. Instead, it mostly comes from doing the boring things really well. Papa John’s decided to focus on making a great tasting pizza while competitors were focusing on low price and fast delivery instead. To make better tasting pizza, he had to charge a bit more and could not deliver quite as fast. He also needed to offer fewer menu options so that his fresh ingredients could be both affordable and profitable.

Focusing on execution is important for a couple of reasons. First, most competitions in established markets are dogfights where every small advantage is crucial. And even if you violate Rule #2 and enter a new market, if it’s a good market soon enough you’ll have plenty of competitors.

Great execution is much more difficult for competitors to copy than changes in products, prices, or features. In the above example about pizza-flavored milkshakes, if it turned out that people really enjoyed pizza in liquid form, Domino’s could add pizza shakes to their menu fairly easily. It’s much more difficult for entrenched competitors to quickly change things like company culture, customer service quality, management techniques, and logistics.

The Papa John’s story serves a great example of how you can build a $650 million business simply by executing better than the competition.

To conclude, the next time you are brainstorming potential business ideas, think about pizza and the importance of entering an established market and choosing an idea that can succeed on a small scale with little outside funding. Resist the temptation to try to become the next entrepreneurial rock star. You may not be the subject of the next Aaron Sorkin movie, but if you follow my two rules, the recipe for your entrepreneurial success might be a lot simpler than you originally thought. And graduation speech requests may be directed to keynotes@sharefile.com.

Jesse Lipson is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of ShareFile