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.
Before I share with you my arsenal of the top Internet tools that almost certainly assist you to operate remotely, I must bring to your attention one more item aboutself management and specifically to do with maintaining your focus and levels of concentration
I’ve observed and confirmed a common trait in men and women who work on the web and I’ve known for a substantial period and I call this trait the 50 minute rule. I spotted these contacts who concentrate and work for fifty mins. and then kick back for a complete ten mins. break and are a significant order of magnitude more efficient and produce a much higher quality of work than people who don’t have such distinct working methods.
OK as promised here is my list of preferred remote working online services:
Electronic Mail
Google Mail won’t cost you a penny. But in my opinion the search and label (a bit like folders) mechanisms are most definitely the best I have so far discovered. The downside is it can be a bit slow on older machines
Phone calls Skype occasionally drove me to despair as the connection performance was unacceptable, but three cheers for the coders at Skype now as they have considerably refined the quality of the service. For just a few bucks a quarter Skype lets me call and conference in any telephone and Skype subscriber on Earth. The latest edition of Skype has a wealth of really good functions and there are now plenty of of practical add ons.
Organising Content Evernote has reached over a million users in no time at all – it enables you to store, organise and annotate any species of digital content up on the Internet. Just go check it out…it’s free.
Invoicing, Time and Expenses capture, Accounting and CRM
You almost certainly know that my burning desire to work remotely was originally encouraged by Quickbooks Online, a small business accounting software web application. But it is shadowed by the free edition of salesorder.com – a lead to cash system that’s as easy to use as a kettle I looked at NetSuite whose pricing (and people) scared me off. My choice here is salesorder.com – Go check it out.
The main reason workers fail to adapt to working remotely is they fail to recognise the essential requirement of excellent organisation and rigid self discipline.
I have been working remotely for almost a decade since I first discovered Quickbooks online an ‘on demand’small business accounting software online system and was struck by the fact that if you can perform accounting on the net then why shouldn’t it be viable to perform other key types of of work at a distance?
Whilst working remotely has its obvious perks there are numerous traps that people easily fall into which lead to problems that result in decreased work output and lower motivation. The top reason for decreases in work output from remote professionals is disruption and it is a proven and well known fact that it can take a person up to twenty minutes to establish their original productivity level after experiencing an interruption.
Research also shows that people who are regularly experience interruptions are more likely to be susceptible to decreased memory capacity and are prone to developing mental health problems in old age. We exist in an over communicated environment and it is essential that you know the problems this causes before you decide to work remotely. When working remotely you have to do everything possible to mitigate the threat of being interrupted.
Here are the essentials:
1, Get a consistent schedule, make sure that everybody knows it and obsessively maintain it!
Good examples are a fixed time of day when you read or send mail and make or will accept telephone conversatiions. Before I began working remotely I used to get in the region of two hundred electronic mails every 24 hours. Now I think I am unfortunate if I get over four. To ’reset’ my electronic mail experience I changed my e-mail address and obsessively took steps to defend the details being made available to anyone. I then made sure every party who I gave my e-mail address to, to use it wisely and sparingly. I also set up an automatic reply that swiftly informed anyone sending me mail my routine for processing mail and if an item required my immediate awareness to mark it as ‘Urgent’.
2. Get rid of alerts.
Disable every function that can send you a interruption. This includes portable and ordinary handsets and forms of alerts from e-mail such as display events, audible warnings, screen changes to your inbox list and of course facing a window. Get a door on your work place and put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign on it.
In ‘Remote Working Part 3 – The ‘kit’ list’ I will reveal my favourite tools and software.
Obviously not everyone is able to work remotely as many types of employment require employees to be at their office or travel to perform their tasks in person. But for those of us given the opportunity to work remotely then I thought it would be useful to share my experiences and give some practical advice by writing and publishing it on the web in the hope that I could give others helpful advice for adapting to remote working or managing remote workers.
I should warn you that there are a substantial number of self proclaimed ‘gurus’ on the Internet who will try and make you purchase e-books for vast sums of cash, believe me you don’t need to do this.
I am fortunate to be able to work wherever I choose and just about everyone who asks me what work I do wants to understand how I am able to work remotely. Don’t be fooled here I am still improving the science of remote working as each day I come across folks on the Internet who tell me about new ways and I am continually discovering new systems and ways that make my life simpler and make me more effective.
Over the past 7 years I have slowly but surely adapted my working methods to let me to do the majority of my work remotely with a portfolio of online tools and rigid self discipline. One afternoon whilst exploring the Internet I discovered Quickbooks online and this inspired me as to what just might be possible. The encounter with ’cloud’ based ‘on demand’small business accounting software was a pivotal moment for me and the start of my ‘remote working experience.
I must state up front that productively working remotely is as much about the systems as it is about self management. Working remotely also means getting across to your team members, supervisors and clients as to what they can expect and how they will communicate with you.
In ‘Remote Working Part 2 – Things you should know about managing yourself’ I show you how to focus.