Managing a company efficiently is about organisation, focus and process as a massive 55% of businesses don’t survive the first five years. The observers offer shallow explanations as to why this occurs. I consistently see three key reasons why this tragedy occurs so often and to so many people with different backgrounds, qualifications and skill.
The first reason is lack of market comprehension.
Refusal to look at the water ahead. For example Individuals have the idea, build the product and then sit back and wait for the market to come and purchase. In networked age there is no excuse for lack of research prior to spending any time and cash on creating a product until you have firm evidence there is a market.
The second reason is lack of comprehension of the basics of business.
A significant proportion of folks starting a company know their trade, how to deliver a service or build a product, but not how to run a business. Being able to understand and follow the balances in the profit and loss or the balance sheet is a vital. The basic knowledge of accounting is not very often imparted well by the business publications, internet resources and those with the knowledge such as accountants and bookkeepers. This subject is further exacerbated by technology vendors and their affiliates thrusting small business accounting software at fledgling businesses.
Sage software and other vendors as usual are underserving small businesses.
Large corporations way back worked out that all of their Information systems should be wired together to give them a complete picture of the business and then along came ERP software solutions and packages. One vendor NetSuite had the vision to see the opening in the market and started selling its small business ERP software. NetSuite pricing has since increased and put their technology out of the financial reach of small businesses.
The last reason companies don’t make it is a because of the absence of good management processes and policies to enable a sustainable fabric of disciplines and behaviours.
I want to help you save money and I am never going to ask you for a penny in return.
Every year I save hundreds of euros by not spending any money on software. It was the Sage Software that pushed me over the edge one afternoon and drove me to look for a better deal for systems to run my business. I know that I can do most of the essential tasks in my business on high quality software that costs $0. They dont teach this at Harvard. The majority of small business people I come into contact dont know anything about this subject and thats a tragedy.
I just follow these three steps to get the free tools.
* Take just ten minutes each day to search for just one tool type. * Use Evernote (free at www.evernote.com) to record your findings. * Spend just ten minutes on every day on trying out one of the packages you find.
Keep this up for just four weeks and you will have a really good selection of free tools you can use to get things done in your business. OK, fast start for you a small selection of the tools I use everyday that work well and you should take a look at.
Chances are you have heard or are using the software tools I have listed on the right, I have done this to help you easily identify the tools you may want to evaluate as replacements which are listed on the left.
Here we go:
Just type the name of the free product to the search engines
One system to manage customers and accounting
salesorder.com pricing: free Sage Software – really expensive and only does Accounting
Creating and writing Documents
Google Docs pricing: $0 Microsoft Office pricing – at least $100
Or
OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org)
Sharing ideas online
Bubbl.us pricing: $0 Mindjet pricing – at least $200
Making videos
Jing pricing: $0 Camtasia Studio pricing – at least $300
Teleseminars
DimDim pricing: $0 AdobeConnect pricing – at least $200/month
My thanks to the Sage Software incident for the inspiration!motivation to blog this and help you out.
I will be publishing a long list here in the near future…
My perception is accounting is really unnecessarily complicated but after wrestling with my accounting problems for a while I found a really useful shortcut that I wanted to share with you. Everyone who starts or manages their own business has ’higher priority’ tasks to perform than spend time on their accounting. Accounting is a ‘chore’ that many people look forward to doing but must be attended to on a regular basis to avoid disaster.
I asked my accountant for advice and he persuaded me to use Sage Software which turned out to be a small business accounting software package. Without even evaluating software I simply went ahead and bought the cheapest version I could find. On reflection I am relieved I didn’t waste too much cash on this as this software is possibly the worst and most unfriendly application I have ever been faced with. OK my first piece of wisdom is that whenever you see the words accounting software go carefully as it definitely means the developer isassuming you know a great deal about accounting.
Like me I know this just isn’t the case for most small business managers and this inspired me to put aside time that I couldn’t spare to search for a solution to make my life simpler. It was really worth doing this as I discovered a more useful solution than I could ever of dreamed of named salesorder.com.
This is arguably the simplest system I have ever found and what’s more it is net based and therefore I can access it from anywhere I choose to work. Better still and the third piece of wisdom I want to share with you is that the people who work at salesorder.com are not just very knowledgeable of their service but they know a great deal about the problems of managing a small enterprise and have taught me the bookkeeping I need to know.
You might have heard of SAP systems. It’s a software platform used by thousands of medium sized and big businesses all over the planet. The objective of the package is to ‘wire’ the whole company together and let hundreds and often thousands of staff members to store, share and view knowledge concerning the physical and financial activities of the organisation. Significant enterprises are managed by smart individuals who know the strategic benefits of this type of software, such as how it can give them insight into why difficulties are occurring inside their firm or where there might be opportunity for refinements.
This type of package is often known as ERP. It is very complex, very expensive and can take months and often years to deploy. An installation of ERP software is a major capital expenditure but this doesn’t prevent big businesses procuring these systems.
Until this year software like this was not available or affordable for small companies. As a result tiny firms have not been aware of the substantial benefits that ERP systems can offer. Tiny companies have been hoodwinked by predatory software like Sage Software and Intuit that small business accounting software is what they need. These packages most often have no features to enable their users to connect the entire company or undertake common tasks such as customer relationship management.
It is for this reason that small business ERP companies in the same category as Salesorder.com have begun to make great progress in the market. They deliver on demand software containing all of the major features a small enterprise needs at an affordable price. What is even more compelling is these systems are easy to use and can be installed rapidly.
At last ERP systems are no longer the privilege of big enterprises.
