Ian and I had lunch yesterday with our wicked smart “virtual CFO,” Joey Brannon. Since Eat Media’s inception, Joey, who owns Axiom CPA, has been our right hand financial man. We tell him our goals, he helps us make the right choices and he isn’t afraid to hold our feet to the fire. (Plus he draws right on his window, which is super cool and keeps us creative types engaged as he talks about FUTA and SUTA.)

Some of the many lessons I’ve learned from working with Joey:
-    Write out an org chart for where you expect to be in the next year.
-    Rent an office space large enough to accommodate this org chart.
-    Keep a minimum of three months operating costs in a separate bank account.
-    When interviewing potential employees, look for those who ask “vision questions” rather than “how much” questions.
-    Speaking of employees, most of the time, young and hungry trumps experienced and set-in-their-ways.
-    Keep a running spreadsheet of your projected sales, labor costs and monthly operating expenses. Organize it by month. At the end of each quarter, plug in your actuals, and adjust your budgeting accordingly.
- It might take an hour to write out a process for an action that could take you five minutes to complete. But that hour you spend documenting a process will be your LAST hour working on the task (vs. a lifetime of five minutes).

Yesterday, Joey told us about a few things he’s been doing at his own business—things we hope to do someday soon:
-    Time blocking: Schedule one day (or one morning) a week to work on your business.
-    If, as a business owner, you’re not taking at least as much vacation time as you’d get working for someone else, it’s time to re-evaluate.
-    Even better, decide how many vacation days you want to take this year, and block off the time. If your time is billable, figure out how much you need to increase your billable hours each week to make up for your time out of the office.
-    Make updating operations manuals part of your employee’s jobs. This applies to everything from documenting their daily processes to keeping their job descriptions up to date.

For a goldmine of more small business tips, check out Joey’s blog.

—Britta

In this ever more digital age, it’s a compelling question.

Google is making a massive effort to digitize library collections from around the world, bringing millions of tomes into the collective ether that is the internet.

But are they still books once they’ve been coded into ones and zeros?

Virginia Heffernan addressed the question from another angle in her wonderful blog, The Medium, in the Sunday New York Times. The question was first offered to her by her young son after he’d completed reading something online and was asked by the computer, “Did you like this book?” He balked and refused to answer the question, insisting that what he’d just read — definition of the publisher aside — was not a book.

Heffernan goes on to agree, even though she’s an admitted devotee of both Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader and her Blackberry. Both may present text, but neither offers the same experience.

Don’t believe it? Take a tour around the web. Look at how some of the most hard-wired digiterati are using blogs, Tweets and other electronic signals to promote something printed on paper and bound into what we all think of as a book.

Is Google’s library going to be an impressive achievement? Absolutely. Is it going to be filled with information? More than any one person could ever see. But it won’t have a single book in it.

Will a Kindle ever offer the sensory intimacy of words on paper? Even if the new Kindle can somehow send out a little puff of new paperback smell (Go ahead, pick up a pocket paperback off your shelf and crack it open. Evocative, no?). Even if you could drop it in the sand without panic and even if they installed a little device that would whip out and give you a nasty paper cut once in a blue moon, it still would not be a book.

— Jonathan