For some years now, I’ve used a business coach. She is my strategic planning therapist, so to speak. For those of you not familiar with business coaches, these are professionals trained to assist business people to work through a range of business challenges. For the small business person, a coach can be particularly handy.
Strategic Planning for Small Businesses
If you are at all like me and have ever thought about developing a strategic plan for your business, you know what a hassle it is to get the ball rolling. I have had my primary consulting practice operating for almost 12 years and I have not developed a written plan. That is unfortunate. Read the full article
Phone Systems: My BizFon 680
Once in awhile, I have found the newer isn’t necessarily better. The best example that I can think of is my phone system - a BizFon 680. As a small business person, I have a home based office with three incoming phone lines. Like many entrepreneurs, I turned to my local phone company for help. The company, Verizon, offers a Centrex system that allows call forwarding, caller ID, call rollover and so on. I simply plug in my phones and its done. That was fine for awhile but it was a clumsy system. Transfering calls was a pain, I couldn’t create vioce mail boxes for my co-workers and it was a pain to forward calls to my cell phone. I did a bit of searching on the net and found a number of PBX systems. However, many were really expensive ($5000 and up).
SugarSync: where’s my File? Oh …
I recently read somewhere about a new technology - SugarSync. As with many new eGismos, it was free so I decided to try it out. SugarSync is a unique tool that synchronizes selected files on all of your computers with its software installed. The synchronization works in the background and it updates files instantanously.
Skype: Gentlemen, Mount your Headsets!
Today I want to talk about Skype, the Internet (IP) based technology for making free (or cheap) phone calls around the globe.
Skype has been around awhile, in the technology sense. While many of you are at least familiar with Skype, if not already using this service, many of you are not.