Grow Your Business Exhibition

Is your business growing virtually?

When you run your own business, every penny counts.  Gone are the corporate days when you could run off a thousand brochures and send them out with first class post without batting an eye.  And every penny certainly counts if you start to think about building a team and hiring people to support you in what you do.

Five years or so ago, the only way to get administrative support and help to manage your office was to hire someone, either on a contract or take them on to payroll.  And taking someone on to payroll is indeed a BIG commitment.

It's not just the monthly commitment of a fixed salary being paid.  It's also the red tape that goes along with it all. Maternity leave, sick pay, insurance costs and so the list goes on.  The legalities that keep employees safe can just be too much for a self-employed person to take on.

But does that mean you have to struggle on and do your own admin, manage your emails, arrange workshop bookings and confirm client orders all by yourself?

Absolutely not!

Welcome to the world of Virtual Assistants.  Now, just in case you are unsure what a VA (Virtual Assistant) is, they are, first of all, real people (yes, I did have someone ask me if Alexia, who is my VA for the CanDoCanBe networking, was a real person and not some clever virtual admin tool I had found on the web!!).

VAs are people who assist you in your business virtually from their own offices and homes.  The VA profession has been around in the US and Australia for many years but has exploded here in the UK over the past couple of years.

So what can a VA do for your business?

This is the great bit!  A VA is not just a PA who will manage your email (although there are plenty of VAs who can do just that for you).  A VA is much more than an admin assistant who sorts out a few invoices for you.

You see, a VA is not a cost centre.  A VA has potential for being a profit-generating part of your business if you consider him or her to be.

Delegate the right tasks and business functions and a VA could be a mini-you massively increasing your ability to be in more places, do more things and make more income.

Let me give some examples:

Your email newsletter - you write the content, your VA formats & sends it 

Your website - you write the content, your VA updates the pages 

Your articles - you write the content, your VA submits them to article submission sites and printed magazines 

Your blog - you  write the content, your VA publishes it 

And the really great bit is that your VA can do all four of the above examples, with you only having to write the "content."  One article can become your newsletter, a new website page, a new blog article and numerous press releases.

So, do you see how a VA could be more than an admin assistant, but also someone who could help increase your marketing opportunities and be a profit-generating part of your business?

If you are interested in finding out more about VAs and where to find one, then I can recommend the resources below:

www.UKAVA.co.uk

www.VACT.co.uk

www.AssistU.com

Karen Skidmore helps self-employed professionals and home business owners to create successful (and profitable!) business from home. To subscribe to her free email newsletter and get access to practical advice and marketing ideas that will move your business forward, visit www.CanDoCanBe.com

Creating a better working space

Have you ever felt that your ‘home office’ or study is ‘cluttered’?
Creating the right space for ’working from home’ is essential, as it affects the way you feel about work, as well as the time it takes to find documents and complete your tasks. In this update we focus on ways of creating space.
How would you rate your working space?
Here are some questions to ask yourself about space.
Is your space easy to work in? Does it motivate you?
Do you have piles of paper, books or gadgets on the floor or on chairs?
Can you find the things you need quickly?
Can you concentrate — with no distractions?

Create more desk space There is a place for everything ... and it probably isn’t the desk. So offload everything you are not working on into compartments or ‘surround desk’ storage.
Use clever storage Wall and mobile storage can be a great way to store small items.
Think ahead Isn’t it funny how there never seems to be enough storage? We recommend thinking about all your needs and taking a comprehensive approach to storage, rather than adding bits and pieces after it has become too ‘cramped’.
Store vertically To help create space we suggest storing your papers, magazines and gadgets vertically. In drawers, compartments, and on shelves. As high as you can reach.
File it Which costs more — your time or a filing cabinet? A good filing system will save you time, space and stress.

David Bridger runs Flujo, dedicated to helping people work more efficiently from home. You'll find him on Stand 3 at the Grow Your Business event.

Is your home office technology making you less effective?

The world of business and technology continues to change, impacting the type of work we do from home and making new things possible. New business trends are enabling closer collaboration between companies (and outsourced talent such as freelancers) and exploitation of data to make better decisions, while new forms of information are creating new business opportunities. In addition, there are so many different technology advances that it would be impossible to squeeze them into a single article.

What is the best way to kit out your home office in a world where all the discussion is about Youtube, Facebook and VoIP? What will make working life better without becoming paralysed by technobabble?
Creating the ideal technology setup can be a question of thinking about ‘what would be ideal’ and then working backwards to the available technology - see the box insert to help you think this through. Current home office technology can be broken down into: Computers; Connectivity; Communication and collaboration; Data, storage and security; Productivity.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF:
• Which areas are most important to my job?
• Accessing information, whenever and wherever I am but making sure it is secure
• Being available to customers and having phone calls routed to wherever I am
• Sharing resources such as printers to reduce cost
• Easily communicating with colleagues, customers and partners – from quick chats to formal online ‘meetings’
• What type of technology user am I? Do I want to avoid technology or create ‘the office of the future’? What is my choice in trading quality versus cost?
• What do I want my home office to be? A basic functional space, a highly effective space, or a place to create my best ideas?

The computer itself: the two basic tools remain the laptop and the desktop. Price performance means both are cheaper than ever before. Laptops are becoming more ‘personal’, tablet PCs are a growing market and the latest communications are generally built in.

In terms of connectivity, large suppliers are combining services and reducing the cost of communications (although often also reducing the level of service). A confusing array of Internet connectivity packages is now available: from cheap landline-broadband packages to high quality VoIP-based communications. The good news is that it is now possible to have a combined high quality VoIP-based phone and broadband/Internet package that is managed by a third party provider – where your phone calls are unaffected when you download a large file over the Internet.

This consistent, fast connectivity also promotes access to new services such as ‘renting’ applications like Outlook/ Exchange, online ‘backup’, virtual PA services and social/business networking. For secure access to shared company resources and information between multiple sites - and over the Internet- the Virtual Private Network (VPN) is now more accessible to smaller businesses through companies such as Clearpath Networks. Wireless technology (WiFi and Bluetooth) allows people to roam around the house, share computers, printers and disk storage, avoid messy cables across the floor and quickly add new devices.
Now, communicating and collaborating. Do we need to be ‘online, real-time, 24 hours a day’ or just need to talk to people on an ad hoc basis during the day? The basic tools of communication remain a business phone (for incoming and outgoing calls) plus a mobile phone. Previously mentioned VoIP services also connect your mobile phone to your wireless network (for free calls), or plug a VoIP phone into your computer or into the network. The nirvana is probably ‘unified communications’ where all of your phone, email and fax messages are delivered to a single ‘inbox’. There is a range of working solutions, from Siemens OpenOffice to smaller suppliers like IP Centrex.

A previous Flujo survey found that loneliness can be a key concern for homeworkers, so we may also want to conference with colleagues or customers via Skype (which delivers variable quality but is ‘free’) or subscription-based video conferencing where you can share applications, presentations, chat and so on.

A mix of casual communications, formal conferencing and social/business networking plays a key part in the life of the homeworker. Making this as easy, consistent and as high quality as possible is essential.
Now let’s talk about data and security. Bearing in mind recent news stories about missing data, we need to follow the right practices with customer or sensitive information. This may concern the security of a customer database, or the process of transferring company data from home to a work PC, whilst making sure everything is backed up. You can store data on your PC, a small USB stick, a big disk attached to your computer, a home-based server (or networked storage disk) or rent space on an Internet server. The advantages of these different types of storage depend on how much data you have and how you feel about ‘security’, but new storage disks now come with fingerprint access technology which are ideal for simple, home-based security.

Finally, even in a fantastically connected office productivity plummets if you spend time searching for information in piles of paper on the floor. One solution is to quickly scan all the paper, store documents on your computer and use a free desktop search tool, such as Google Desktop, to find those documents again in seconds. This approach could save you a lot of time – and has the additional benefit of taking up less space than even the most efficient paper filing system.
Other tools worth a mention are voice recognition software (now fairly reliable) and personal organisation software (from sharing calendars through Google, to achieving your life goals through Franklin Covey planning).

In the end success comes down to your own personal approach to effectiveness and technology. If you adopt all these technologies you may become a homeworking ‘star’ - or drown under the complexity. The secret is to ‘demand more’ from technology – demand that it makes life easier, not more complex, adds real value and is reliable.

David Bridger is a director of Flujo, a company that provides well-designed home office solutions www.flujohome.com