Turning Down Congestion

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The Globe and Mail today published an article titled, Fed up with traffic, contractors refuse to work in Vancouver, which stated:

[Vancouver] homeowners are facing the high cost of renovation and maintenance as tradespeople either opt out of working in the city entirely, or charge extra for having to go there.

A big reason for the premium cost of hiring the trades is the city’s traffic, contractors say. Vancouver traffic is so congested, and so time-consuming, it makes working there a losing proposition.

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Negotiating Need

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I received an email from a local photographer about my previous post. This photographer couldn’t see anything wrong with doing 70 business headshots for $1,000 (i.e., $14 per portrait). She said she “would be thrilled” to make $1,000 in one day. She said she’s been a professional photographer for ten years.

Sigh.

After a couple of e-mail exchanges, it was clear this photographer didn’t know the difference between revenue and profit. She knew nothing about overhead costs, didn’t track any of her expenses and didn’t even have an Ontario business licence. But yet she’s a “professional”.
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It’s the photographer not the price

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If you’re about to hire a photographer, remember that you get what you pay for. Low price always gets you low quality.

Business headshots never cost anywhere near $15 each no matter what the volume. Expect *at least* quadruple that amount for a high volume shoot with minimal editing.

When you hire a photographer, you’re paying for both the photography and the photographer. The experience and quality of the photographer directly affects the success of the photos. Photos do not create themselves.

If one professional is saying they will do the work for $100 per hour and another is quoting you $200 per hour, your instinct shouldn’t immediately jump to the one offering the lowest price.

As an example, maybe the higher-priced solution has the learnings from a 20 year career vs. a 5 year career, to help you avoid more known pitfalls that you don’t even see coming. Or, they have helped 20 clients succeed in similar situations, vs. 2 clients succeed . . .

– George Deeb, Forbes

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Campaigning for Attention

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Ontario has a provincial election in two weeks. But this election seems to have far fewer lawn signs and billboards than in the past. Many (most?) campaign signs don’t have a picture of the candidate.

Perhaps having fewer campaign posters is a result of cost-cutting. Fewer lawn signs and billboards but a lot more robocalls. Or maybe candidates are relying more on social media.

Why don’t all candidates use a business portrait of themselves? Is this also because of cost? A sign with a colour photo requires four-colour printing but a plain lawn sign is usually just a single spot colour. Or maybe people don’t vote for a candidate but rather they vote for a political party so a business headshot might seem unnecessary.

But not using a candidate headshot is an odd place to cut costs. Many studies over the past 35 years have proven that a good headshot will earn more votes. The lack of a business headshot also greatly reduces the amount of attention a candidate (and their lawns signs) will get.
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Mind Your Own Business

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It’s been said the most important thing to learn is how to learn.

Most people will do a Web search when they need to learn something because it’s fast and free. But search engines offer disconnected, unverified information in random order. The searcher has to know how to interpret and verify the found information. They have to know how to learn.

The purpose of search engines is to offer shortcuts to what you *might* want to know. This is okay when you just want some quick information but it’s usually not good enough when you want to gain knowledge.

By making it easy, search engines don’t really help us learn. Search engines tell us what we asked for and not necessarily what we need to know. Search results can make you think you’ve learned something when, in fact, you haven’t (link to PDF). There’s a difference between knowing a few facts and actually learning something.
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Fixing the Payfirma for WooCommerce Plugin

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This post is only for those who use WooCommerce as their eCommerce platform and Payfirma as their credit card processor. This means that 99.9999% of you can stop reading right now.

The Payfirma plugin (currently version 2.6) for WooCommerce isn’t fully compatible with WooCommerce 3.x and Payfirma has said it has no plans to update it. So if you’re tired of the plugin generating a ton of php errors, here’s the solution that will take just a couple minutes of your time.

In the Payfirma_Woo_Gateway plugin, go to class > class.payfirma.php and scroll down to about line 508. Look for the block of code that reads:
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Fixing A Hole

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Photographers, do you recognize this little thing:

Hint #1: It costs about 40 cents.

Hint #2: If it breaks, it can prevent you from properly using your expensive long lens.
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