A One-Eyed Man is King

I read a great post the other day by Scott Hanselman entitled Painful Reminder: Focus on Core Competencies (and Back Stuff Up).  I’ve been thinking about it for a day or so now and I couldn’t agree more with what he says.  The two main points are Backup Your Stuff or Die and Do What You’re Good at and Let Folks Do What They’re Good at.

In my opinion, both of these points are HIGHLY applicable to small businesses.  Back in the day, we technology consultants typically steered growing businesses to host their email in house and to have servers locally installed for file and printer sharing.  At the time, it was really the only option in most cases. 

Business owners don’t start companies to worry about servers and email problems and such.  They start because they have an idea that they are passionate about (or will make them rich…).  The technology of today has finally caught up with this reality.  We can have other people worry about the details and get to work on the business. 

So what the heck am I babbling on about, exactly?  An example, if you will:

Every business needs email, right?  (the answer is yes.)  So you have some choices to make.  You can buy a server, software for the server, software to run on my desktops and laptops and then pay some technology company (or some guy that dresses funny who works out of his basement) to support all of the aforementioned.  (that’s the old way) OR you can pay a monthly fee to access virtually all of the same functionality through your browser, mobile phone, or in some cases connected software that runs on your laptop or desktop.  NO server hardware cost, NO server software cost, no funny dressed guy to pay.

There are several options along this line.  (The buzzword being thrown around a lot is Software As A Service (SaaS) or more recently Cloud Computing.)  Salesforce.com (one of the first in this arena) will run all of your Customer Relationship stuff, Google Apps will let you do all kinds of cool Outlook-type things, and Microsoft Online Services has a full blown Office, Exchange and CRM software offering.

All of these products are slick, fairly inexpensive and offer a TON of functionality that will let you keep your focus where it should be…growing your business.

I’ll be going over these services in more details in the next little bit, so stay tuned!

You can’t turn on the news without hearing it.  Unemployment up, spending down, cats and dogs living together…mass hysteria.  But seriously, things are definitely tougher out there for all kinds of business, not just the small ones.  The advantage that I see that small businesses have, much like those tricky prehistoric mammals, is the ability to quickly adapt to the climate.  Big business, like those overgrown lizards of prehistory, adapt slowly if at all.  (I was going to insert some jabs at a few of them here, but the list is too long to choose from.)  The point of all of this is to share some of the ways that I have seen small businesses SAVE MONEY.

1.  Cut out Ma Bell completely.  There are many options out there that can save you some serious money AND give you more options.  Skype is a great VOIP service that’s free to call from PC to PC (great if you have distributed employees or close partners) and just 2.95/month for 10,000 minutes to US and Canada (it’s 30 bucks for a year of inbound calls with a subscription, though).  You can buy a pretty sweet handset for about a hundred bucks that makes it so you don’t even need a computer to use it.  Gizmo5, and even Google Talk are other ways that you can stay connected (although not as slick as Skype).  Not only can you call in and out with these services, you can also do Conference calls, call forwarding, and voicemail.

2.  Free Financial Help.  Online financial services sites like Mint, GeoZeo, and Buxfer can help manage cash flow, notify you when balances are low and do budgeting and reporting for you.  The beauty of these services is that they’ll go get your transactions from your bank and attempt to classify them for you automatically.  It doesn’t always get them right, but it is very easy to correct and saves a ton of data entry.  You can even set them to send you an email or a text message with a summary of your status.

3.  Forget About Microsoft Office.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love Excel and Outlook as much as the next guy, but the prices that you pay (between $200 and $600, depending on the version) to get it are outrageous.  Check out Google Docs, Google Calendar and Gmail.  They allow you to easily collaborate with others, you don’t have to install anything on your computer, and best of all, they’re free.  These tools probably aren’t a fit for everyone (browser crashing while you work is a pain), but you can get an awful lot of mileage out of them.

Obviously I’m a big on using technology to increase efficiency, cut down on overhead and hopefully help the bottom line.  What are you doing to save money in these tumultuous times?