Small Business
Solo Income Up and Running
I’m excited to announce a project I’ve been working on for a long time. I came up with a way for the average person (uh, that’s probably you) to make some extra money, working at home, with very little investment of time and money.
The best part about it is that anyone can do it - if you can type an email you can do this. And you only have to do the work once (about 40 hours worth) to make a monthly income for years.
Spam is Beyond Control
One thing many folks don’t seem to fully grasp is that if you want to be available, that is to say, if you want people to contact you, then you must allow spam in your life. I hate these Russian-originated stock quote spam emails as much as you, but it is a necessary evil in order that people can conveniently have an email address.
Often, I’ll see blog postings and various tech magazines give a list of dozens of ways to control spam. It is quite often more time-consuming and frustrating to implement those ideas than it is to just let spam take its course.
Inbound Faxing
I’ve tried for a while to find a faxing service that will just let me get inbound faxes. The vast majority of online faxing services are tied to the idea that a user wants to send out faxes. Certainly, the biggest fax provider, eFax, is setup with this thinking. I’ve looked a few times and then got to busy to keep at it. But I think I found a good one.
10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job
Steve Pavlina has done it again with an almost outrageous article called 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job that will be sure to infuriate some people. Yes, you know who you are. Granted, Steve makes a relatively small fortune (by some people’s standards) so maybe he is more comfortable saying what many of us think but are afraid to say.
7 Efficiency Tools for Small Businesses
If you aren’t using these seven tools, your business is run by fools. Okay, let me try that again. If you want to break some common sense rules, avoid these seven efficiency tools.
So I don’t have the poetic left-brain side up and running today. But, that isn’t why you read my articles. At least I hope you don’t. You could be in for some considerable disappointment. But, this list should be considered a must-have for a small business.
Traffic Log Can Help Save Money
Many businesses and organizations waste a lot of money staffing during non-productive hours. Worse, they almost always under staff during busy hours.
Download the attached Excel spreadsheet to start tracking the people coming into your place of business. I’m giving this away for free, but please don’t redistribute it under your own name. However, feel free to modify it for your own office’s use.
The log is ideal for determining office hours, staffing hours, etc. Generally, a front desk receptionist should be put in charge of the sheet. I recommend a minimum of two weeks of data before making any decisions based on the data. A two-month period is more ideal, however.
Top 10 Reasons Small Businesses Need a Website
Wrote an article for another site of mine that I thought I’d share here. Sometimes a small business owner will think, even in 2006, that he or she does not need a website - at all. Here are ten very good reasons why that is never the case - assuming the goal of the business is to prosper and succeed.
“Nowadays a company without a Web site is in loser territory-out of touch.” - John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine columnist, June 5, 2006.
Telephone as a “Satisfaction” Driver
When I worked at Allstate, my first job in the insurance industry, they published something called the Agency Service Standards. Yes, we all made fun of the acronym, too. Anyway, the idea was to publish a set of guidelines that would create a sense of uniformity for customers should they visit different agencies. Like all good ideas, it eventually turned into a bureaucratic monster and we all half-expected them to tell us which way to part our hair.
7 Tips to Manage your Agency
I wrote this a while back for insurance agency owners, but it may equally apply to your business.
1. Track (religiously) anything that you want changed. Information is power - and not a burden to track when it helps you achieve your goals. If you don’t know, well then, you don’t know. And if it takes you 30 minutes to find out, you won’t access that information very frequently. The old saying is true: What gets tracked, gets done.
