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Hi. I'm Hattie Bryant. Experience has always been the best teacher, so this television show is about learning best practices and good principles through the real-life stories of successful small business owners. As these men and women tell their stories, we try to capture moments and insights that could encourage all of us to live lives that are on the edge, filled with intention, willing to face risk, and infused with the unique creativity and insights that each of us have.

(Voiceover) If you were watching the show in 1995, you may have caught this little piece of advice.

(Video clip from an episode in 1995) "When you have a website, your world is what is called 24 by 7 global. That means you're open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all around the world. Once you have that site, you start thinking that way, which means the world is your marketplace: no boundaries, no borders."

We said with a website, you would no longer be confined to office hours, and anyone in the world could learn about you and even buy from you while you were asleep. Today nearly every business has at least one web presence, and many of us have multiple sites.

So whether you just have a simple listing on your local newspaper's website or you have fully functioning sites that you host in-house, one thing is for sure: The full power of the Internet, all this connectedness, is still being realized.

Today, nearly every business has at least one web presence and many of us have multiple sites.

To stay in step, not necessarily ahead, your business is increasingly challenged to become an e-culture. And e-culture specially empowers a small business and everyone within it. If you have an e-culture in your business, every person purposefully uses the Internet to do some part of their job. The Net becomes an extension of each person's work.

Let's meet people now who can help us understand what that means.

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(Voiceover) We visit Aptrix. Founder Adam Ginsburg works with his teams in Boston, London and Sydney, where we met him.

This small business does more than design websites. Their software turns web page development over to everyone in the business. Content can become everybody's responsibility. And in an e-culture, every person on your team is responsible for certain web pages. They write, edit and update the actual web pages as an extension of the work and value that defines them within the business.

ADAM GINSBURG (Aptrix Founder): I mean, they've got a massive amount of content, different audiences. We have to target the right people, speak in their language.

HATTIE: When someone buys your product, what are they buying?

ADAM: They basically buy software and then they will also usually buy some training services to be able to learn how to use that software.

HATTIE: OK. What does your software do for them?

ADAM: What it does is it makes it easy for them to maintain the content for their Intranet, extranet and Internet sites.

It allows non-technical people to keep those sites up do date.

It allows you to put some business processes around that, publishing their content, so you might have somebody in the marketing department creating the content, somebody in the compliance or legal department signing it off and then automatically that appears on the website. So really it just makes it easy for people to publish content, to then use as whether they be employees or customers out there. And also you can distribute it so the moment you -- one person is changing your website, you can actually distribute it to, you know, 10, 20, 100 or 1,000 people out there and they can all be using the same system and contributing to the same Intranet or Internet site and keeping it up to date. So it automates the process.

It's guided altering. It simplifies it and really makes it easier to maintain and easier to build those sites.

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HATTIE: What's the difference between the Internet and Intranet and the extranet?

ADAM: Start off within an organization if you just look at how you communicate with the staff of an organization, the employees, etc. That's generally called an Intranet. It's a closed-off network running on your LAN (but often using the Internet as the backbone of the WAN or wide-area-network). It's a way of communicating with your employees whether it's write a different policy, procedure information, sales information. It's internal information. That's your Intranet.

Taking that sort of to the outside world--you don't want to take all of that information to the outside world. You want to take perhaps a subset of that or very specialized content to your Internet site. Your Internet site is something that's available to the general public. There's usually no login. You can--everybody can access it. It's free.

In between those two, there's the extranet, which allows people out there on the Internet, the general public, or a specified group of that, to be able to log in and get specific access to, you know, information.

It's all about targeting the right information to the right person at the right time.

HATTIE: Every person on your team does data mining to develop your target markets.

(Voiceover) New prospects. Customers' references. Everybody thinks about your markets, your positioning and the website helps everybody to do comparative analysis.

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HATTIE: All software programs that are on your local area network have migrated or they are being migrated for use within your Intranet. If you are working within an e-culture, there is not one task that is performed at your office that could not be performed from any location in the world with an Internet access.

(Voiceover) We traveled 10,000 miles to Perth. From this edge of Australia, the founders of Brookstone Technologies, Errol Pollnow and John Stockbridge, work with their team to serve up software which has made ubiquitous computing a reality. These programmers have made it possible for us to serve customers faster and better, capture and manage all forms of communications, and manage projects in a collaborative environment with ease of use being their unique selling proposition.

ERROL POLLNOW (Brookstone Technologies Founder): I started thinking about a virtual office kind of system as early as 1993. And in those days, it was a theory because the technology wasn't quite there. And as technology began to emerge, the opportunity arose for me to have a prototype built. And so I spent I guess since 1993 onwards working on the concept of the electronic conduct of business and the virtual office.

JOHN STOCKBRIDGE (Brookstone Technologies Founder): So, Hattie, one of the reasons we invented this program is so that I could spend more time on the course.

HATTIE: Ohh, nice!

JOHN STOCKBRIDGE: (Voiceover) Our customers buy a product called the BrookstoneVirtualOffice. And it's a suite of software applications.

(Voiceover) And what it's designed to do is to manage and treat the knowledge inherent in a company as an asset. And what we empower people to do is to carry out their day-to-day business regardless of where they are. So they can operate in a mobile environment.

(Voiceover) And that means that they can use handheld computers. They can use laptops. They can use an Internet browser at a airport. And just come in and do--perform any function at that location that they would do--be able to do in their office.

Let's have a look.

I can check my e-mail. Yes, I've got some mail. I need--actually I need to get back to this guy. So I'll just quickly send him e-mail in reply. His e-mail to me is important. So now I'll file that away under his contact name in the virtual office. And because I'm wirelessly connected through my phone, that's going to be on my server when I get back either home, where I've got another computer, or at my office.

HATTIE: So you're telling him, you're...

JOHN STOCKBRIDGE: I'm telling him I'm unavailable at the moment because I'm on a course.

And he's going to think it's a training course...

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HATTIE: In an e-culture, the internet is your meeting room. Even your office or conference room becomes virtual.

(Voiceover) So you've got an office here at Brook House.

ROSEMARY SKEFFINGTON (Time Technology Founder): That's right. Yeah.

HATTIE: And at home.

ROSEMARY: And this is where I work most of my time.

Nigel and Rosemary Skeffington, founders of Time Technology, demonstrate their powerful meeting tool; it is called collaboration software. Greg Steckler designs his log homes online; and his clients collaborate with him on the smallest of changes -- all online, he never even meets most of his customers.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Nigel and Rosemary Skeffington, founders of Time Technology, demonstrate their powerful meeting tool.

ROSEMARY: Oh, I've got a message from Nigel. Can you join the meeting? Because it's...

NIGEL SKEFFINGTON (Time Technology Founder): Hi, Rosie.

ROSEMARY: Because it's...

HATTIE: (Voiceover) What Rosemary and Nigel demonstrate is collaboration software. There are hundreds of products. Their names communicate the struggle to capture its transformative power: Mindbridge, Net Meeting, CoCreate, LiveLink. All trying to say we can now share the same time no matter where we are. The word `collaboration' hides the fact that there is a new place that we all share. Instantly we create a unique place that transcends space and time.

ROSEMARY: Yeah. No, that's fine.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Breaking through Newton's laws, reshaping Einstein. And right now, you'd think you're just watching an online meeting, but it's more than that. Time and space are derivative.

ROSEMARY: Change it to 10. Change it to 10.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) And it is as simple as Nigel gets Rosemary's opinion...

ROSEMARY: Yeah.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) ...he takes that suggestion...

ROSEMARY: That would be much better.

NIGEL: OK. And... HATTIE: (Voiceover) ...the meeting is over. But a revolution has begun. ROSEMARY: Get the rest. Help someone with the rest.

NIGEL: All right. ROSEMARY: OK. Thanks then. NIGEL: See you.

ROSEMARY: OK. Bye. NIGEL: Bye.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) When we all can occupy the same space at the same time, that's a revolution. The relation becomes the primary real.

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GREG STECKLER (Log Rhythms Owner): Good morning.

HATTIE: Well, you must be Greg. GREG: I am.

HATTIE: I thought I was never going to get here.

(Voiceover) Since 1996, Greg has understood the collaboration revolution. He designs log homes online. His clients collaborate with him on the smallest of changes and often they never meet in person.

GREG: And I fell in love with computers about four years ago. And wow, it was just a--I hung up the chain saw and traded it in for a monitor and a keyboard. Come on over, Hattie. I'd like you to meet Kevin Taylor. Kevin, this is Hattie.

HATTIE: Hi.

KEVIN TAYLOR (Log Rhythms): Hattie.

HATTIE: Kevin, I'm Hattie. (Voiceover) In the middle of 45 acres and surrounded by the Bureau of Land Management, Greg and his employees produce plans for log homes. Now tell me what you do in this business here.

KEVIN: Well, basically, what I do is Greg gets the customer and I help out with the design of the house. And then I create a 3-D model for them to see. And then we take it from there and do the working drawings for the builders and that, build the house off them.

(Voiceover) That's still--you're still printing, right?

KEVIN: (Voiceover) Yeah. All our sets we still print, so the people actually have something to look at and for their friends to look at and stuff. And then what we do is these are also our working drawings.

GREG: The global community, the Internet is just tying people from every single city and even rural areas all over the world.

HATTIE: So you love coming here, right?

KEVIN: Oh, yeah. Every day.

HATTIE: Is it to play with this machine?

KEVIN: Oh, basically. Yeah. (Voiceover) I mean, the view helps, but the machine is what brings me back every day.

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HATTIE: In an e-culture, the barriers between international cultures even begin to melt away.

(Voiceover) We traveled 8,000 miles to see how one small business is empowering their customers to reach across language barriers and how they are developing technologies to handle mundane jobs.

Computer Voice: Hi. I'm your virtual receptionist. Please use the boxes below to let my colleagues know you're here. They have been notified and are on their way. Would you like to see our show reel while you wait?

(Voiceover) KMPInternet is the Manchester, England-based e-architecture firm specializing in e-business, e-marketing and portal development. Soon, Linguabots, like the virtual receptionist they developed, combined with their online language translation will enable all web users to learn anything with no language barriers.

BILL DARING (KMPInternet Chairman): Hi. You must be Hattie.

HATTIE: Hi. (Voiceover) Founder Bill Daring is the chairman.

BILL: We actually create the technology that allows you to push the button and translate, OK?

(Voiceover) So it does it at a very fast speed. And I think we're talking about 500 words a minute that we are able to translate. We went to China a couple of years ago and found that they really do need access to Western sites.

(Voiceover) They need to--they're very hungry for knowledge. They want to do business with the West, but one of the barriers is language. We looked at using machine translation modules to create websites that would translate into Chinese to start off with at a touch of a button. And we've created the model which we can do that. One of our goals it to actually ensure that companies see the advantage of this and then incorporate that technology into their sites. Now initially our targets have been governments because governments want to promote exports to various parts of the world, and they want to do it with small or medium-sized enterprises who can't afford that kind of technology. So hopefully we're looking to government bodies to build translation sites that can be used in everybody's website. You can actually hit a button on your own website, using this as a server, to create the language change.

HATTIE: Do you think every business today is a global business? BILL: Yeah, it think it is. I think it is. Business generally is e-enabling itself. It's putting processes in that make--that cut the cost and give better benefit to their customers. So as small-business man, then, we've got to recognize this is going on.

In an e-culture the barriers between international cultures even begin to melt away. One of the biggest barriers is language and here KMP Internet opened our doors to foreign lands -- we adopted their technology and now every page on our site is automatically translated to Chinese.

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HATTIE: In an e-culture the recording of our corporate history, our knowledge of where we have been and why, is ongoing. It becomes documented, reviewed, reinterpreted and part of how we pass on the best of our corporate cultures to the next generation. And in an e-culture, we all have dynamic in-house training programs that can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

(Voiceover) In Westerham, England, about 20 miles southeast of London, we found the simple offices of an international award-winning software company, Transition Associates. Founded by Miles Corbett and David Bowden, the company makes knowledge out of broad data. They serve some of the biggest companies in the world with a team of 16 who work from offices scattered around the country.

DAVID BOWDEN (Transition Associates Founder): Knowledge management is a very broad subject to me. It covers a vast number of things.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) One of Transition Associates' largest customers is Baker Hughes. All over the world, its engineers drill into the plate tectonics of the Earth. The insight and wisdom gained at every location now becomes part of an organic knowledge database built by Transition Associates.

MILES CORBETT (Transition Associates Founder): (Voiceover) This was a really interesting process. David and I knew a lot about their business. We knew a lot about helping people to drill oil wells and what went into that. But they had a new vision. They realized that they knew more about drilling for oil and gas than companies like Amoco, Exxon, AP, Shell, but they didn't know how they could convince them to do so. And they were just in the middle of spending $7 million on an expert system to select drill bits, and they wanted to work out how could they improve that process, because it wasn't going too well at that stage. So two of them wrote a book, 350 pages of close-typed A4 text, one illustration, 350 pages.

And this was a book on how to drill the best oil wells.

DAVID: If you read it, if you could stick through and read it and actually absorb it, it was brilliant stuff. OK? And the beginning of something very good. But it was unusable.

MILES: We took that and translated that into some tools which fragment it down into digestible sizes of object.

DAVID: A lot of what we do is taking people's messages and communicating them, helping to apply them with effect within an organization. And that's a knowledge management story; that's a... course delivery story; to some degree, that's an application development story as well.

MILES: We took their experience, right? We translated it into retained knowledge. And then we built a tool which distributed the ideas.

DAVID: There's a whole lot of new thinking, a whole lot of tools and sort of smaller pieces of expertise and skills that you need to pull together and risks to be aware of--all those things--that will get you delivering online learning successfully. So we see ourselves now as providing to companies that enablement that lets them get to that point where they can successfully deliver e-learning courses.

MILES: It starts with being able to query the best practices, right? Then it moves into sharing the lessons which you're learning locally. And then they have a knowledge practice group that look at all of those lessons, refine them, translate them back into best practice and also reflect them through again into the educational material.

It's called a continuous improvement cycle.

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HATTIE: Within an e-culture all your transactions -- orders, tracking, accounts receivable and accounts payable -- can be done online.

Through the years we have looked at companies who now have an e-culture.

(Voiceover) Tejas Office offered online as early as 1998 and now most customers wouldn't order any other way. So whatever happened to the paperless office?

LUPE FRAGA (founder, CEO): Right. Exactly. Hey, this has been one of the biggest, biggest misconceptions. We're selling more paper now than we ever have. We saw the trend was through Internet ordering and over the Internet and having to supply reports for customers, you know. And so we were out front.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Texas Nameplate's customers have been tracking their orders online since 1999.

International Wine Accessories Internet orders continue to skyrocket.

David Arnold has been doing his accounts payble and accounts receivable online since 1998.

Modern Postcard is my favorite e-culture. The founder caught the vision early and taught his customers first to do business via fax. Then he migrated us to the web.

STEVE HOFFMAN (Modern Postcard, founder/CEO): Yeah, we originally used the Internet primarily to educate our customers, because we found that the biggest challenge with small businesses was actually providing enough information to them so that they could make good decisions.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Steve Hoffman is owner of Modern Postcard. He has 250 employees who produce over 100 million postcards a year for some 150,000 customers, many of whom are very small businesses like us.

STEVE: Fortunately, we started with technology first. When we went to Modern Postcard, the only that we could do it was to have everything internal be digitized. Everything was digital from the very beginning of Modern Postcard.

HATTIE: 1993!

STEVE: Yes, 1993.

HATTIE: You said, `We're going out there. We're not staying with old stuff. We're going forward.' STEVE: If you're going to get 32 images on a plate, how do you get that? The key things with color is it has to be on register and the color has to be good. And the only way you can do that is through digital technology. We solved the problems back in 1993, '94 in terms of doing that. And so internally we had a completely digital workload. Now it was a question of: How do we take people's information and stuff from the outside inside?--because we already knew where the land mines were.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) To build a postcard online, you just go to modernpostcard.com and choose `build online.' Stock artwork is provided, or you can send in your own photos and artwork. We've done both. Write your copy, submit the card, give them your credit card and voila. And you can also e-mail your mailing list so that you never lift another finger until you receive your own copy in the mail.

STEVE: Our main problem is getting the rest of the world to catch up to where we know it should be. And that just takes time.

HATTIE: So are you optimistic about that?

STEVE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, everything's totally heading the right direction. It just takes, you know, time for people to understand some of the details.

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PS

HATTIE: Is an e-culture about eliminating paper completely? Probably not. Here's our marketing adviser John Wargo.

JOHN: No. I don't think paper's going to go away. And actually I think what you're going to find is that the e-culture will probably produce more paper and more handwritten correspondence.

You know, many people thought that when the video chains came out that the movie theaters were going to fold. Well, that didn't happen. People thought that newspapers were going to go away when radio came. Well, that didn't happen. Actually, communication begets communication. And it's really knowing how to use each of the mediums properly.

E-mail has a very important place, but so does handwritten letters.

HATTIE: Do you think young people today--I mean, it seems to me that they love the speed of e-mail so much that it's going to be hard to convince them that frankly that's not really the way you do big business.

JOHN: Big deals are really made by taking the time to build a personal relationship. Big deals are not made on the run with haste and with speed and only with efficiency.

HATTIE: Are you telling me that you actually receive handwritten notes?

JOHN: Yes, even today. And I deal with people all over the world, you know. For example, here's a note from one of our suppliers. Here's a note from one of our contractors. These people are cementing a relationship with me.

HATTIE: So a piece of advice you might give someone who's trying to build a business today?

JOHN: Well, you want to build a relationship. Using the relationship, don't forget to use a handwritten note. It really does make a difference, and it will be appreciated. It does take a little time. But that's why the people appreciate receiving it. And it will be opened and read. And it will not be a broadcast message.

It will show that you care and you want to build a relationship with them.

In the Studio

Think hard. Where do you stand now? Do you have a fully functioning e-culture with every employee using the Internet purposefully? Are you heading in that direction or are you stuck in the last decade, the old millenium.

(Voiceover) The men and women we have learned from today have grabbed ahold of the future. They are leading with vision. They have invested money and sweat into connecting all their ideas. They are the builders and users of the tools of an e-culture. They're on the right path and you can be, too.

Don't go into denial. All business is adopting an e-culture and we need to adopt it sooner or later.

We'll see you next time.