A few months ago I wrote a post about a tool I use in my business – I use Batchbook as my CRM tool.  Today I want to talk about another tool I use on a regular basis.  This one is Evernote.  Essentially Evernote is like an electronic notebook and filing system all rolled into one.  Their tagline is “Remember Everthing” and that is exactly what this tool helps me do.

See an article online that interests you but you don’t have time to read it?  Cut the URL and paste it into Evernote.  Think about something while you are away from your computer?  Make a note on your smartphone.  Get an annoying error message on your computer that you want to include in your email to support?  Grab a screenshot and save it.  See a great billboard while you are driving around town?  Take a picture and file it in Evernote.

To me there are a number of really cool things about Evernote:

• You can make notes on one device, say your computer and pull them up on another device, for example your smartphone or iPad.
• There are many ways to make “notes” – text, pictures, screenshots, voice messages, etc.  You can choose whatever method works for you at any given time.
• You can create “folders” to store your notes, just like in the paper world
• You can also tag your notes in any way you want so you can search on topics across folders.

What do I do with Evernote?

• I keep a log of all my blog posts, the URL and topics so I can easily find them and use the URLs for linking.
• I also use it to keep ideas for future blog posts and newsletter articles.
• I have folders on topics I am researching.  The folders have notes as well as saved URLs so I can find reference articles in a flash
• I also use it for non-work stuff too – it is my new recipe/cookbook tool.  I read a lot of food blogs and cook a great deal and I use Evernote to keep track of the recipes and the URL where I found them.  I can use tags to identify what sort of dish it is, what part of the meal it would be applicable for, etc.

I have found this to be a great tool for my small business and it really helps me cut down on the amount of paper I shuffle.  Oh, and it is free!  Give it a try and let me know what you think!

I will start this post with an admission – I am about to flog the horse that should have been dead, buried and forgotten at least 10 years ago.  Fax machines should be like phones with cords, tvs without remotes, ironing boards and other vestiges of electronics past.  They should be things that our children ask us about with a quizzical expression as if it to say “Really?  You sent documents over phone lines as sound?”.

Yet, I can pull up a handful of websites and there is the fax number, prominently displayed after the phone number and before the email address.  As if the small business in question would rather receive a fax than an email.  I can walk into a small business, like I did recently at the garage where I get work done on my car, and there it sits.  Again, really?

I wish I could say I am the only one to write about this but alas that is not the case.  I can f ind many articles on the same topic (like here, here and here).  And yet.  My hope is that none of you read those articles or, if you did, you just didn’t get the point until now, because of some pithy thing I have to say.  Because the fact is this:  fax machines are useless and should be retired.

Why?  Well first of all, to use a fax machines you have to first print a document, then stick it in a machine and then it prints AGAIN at the destination.  That means double the paper usage, especially if that document was electronic on your end and would never have been printed otherwise.

Second, some small businesses are still paying for a second phone line to support faxes.  The ones they get about 3 times a year.

Finally, faxed documents are almost always of poor quality, faint and smudged and often crooked with parts cropped off.  That is hardly a professional image to be presenting!

There are easy alternatives.  You can email that document directly from your PC.  If it was already printed and has a signature or the like you can scan the document and email it.  In fact for lots of reasons a scanner is a better investment today than a fax machine.  Not only can you get rid of your fax machine but you can scan and store your documents, reducing the amount of paper on hand.

So why do folks hold on to fax machines with white knuckles?  Inertia in some cases.  In others the business owners don’t  have the experience emailing and scanning.  Others have a faulty sense that a scanned document is “more official” or “more secure”.  Did you know that easiest way to forge a document is to cut out someone’s signature, glue or tape it to a document and then fax it?

For kicks and grins, how about keeping track of the faxes you send a receive each month.  Is there another way to send or receive that document?  Likely the answer is yes.  If you still have a few outliers (and I would honestly like to know what they are because I can’t think of any examples) you can use a service like efax.com to support those.

Let’s  the fax die its belated but natural death and simplify your technology this spring!

Photo courtesy:

In my last post I talked about how small businesses can become more convenient for their customers if they allow online self-secheduling.   I promised that this post would talk about what online appointment scheduling services are available.  This is a representative list; it isn’t a formal review nor is it an exhaustive list.  The ones I am going to talk about are cloud-based services (see this post if you don’t know what cloud computing is) that are easily hooked into your website.

So how do they work?  There is some variance but basically:

• you provide information about business hours, who can be scheduled, what services are offered and the appointment length of each service
• you also provide setup information about how you want to be notified about appointments (email or text), what sort of confirmations and reminders you want sent to your customers (email or text).  You can also specify if you want to be able to approve appointments before they are confirmed.
• you are given a small snippet of code (or a widget)  that needs to be included on your website.  Generally these can be customized so they match your website and look like they are integrated.  You can also include “book now” buttons in strategic places on your website or other places on the web (like your Facebook page for example), sending visitors to your appointment page.

Customers can now schedule appointments online!  Back at your office you’ll have a master calendar that shows your the appointments, allows you to confirm them and to book appointments you receive from drop-ins or via phone call – all on a consolidated calendar.

Some of the services provide, in some cases based on the service level you choose to purchase, mobile scheduling, calendar syncing, online pre-payment and smartphone integration.

Service providers include Bookfresh.com; Schedulicity.com, Genbook.com, Appointment-plus.com, Appointmentquest.com, Flashappointments.com and Netappointment.com.  You generally pay monthly based on the options you select – for example it costs more for more people or multiple locations.   Prices start as low as $10 a month.

How many times have you at the end of a busy day (week?  month?  year?) got to the point on your to-do list where you need to make a hair-dog grooming-dentist-doctor-exterminator-repair appointment but it is, of course because you’ve been busy, after business hours?  What happens?  That item remains on your list and, maybe worse, gets shoved further and further down the list.  Aggravating for you, right?  And what about that hair dresser, dog groomer, dentist, doctor, exterminator or repair person?  They are missing out on your current business and might lose your long term business if you find someone who provides their service but is easier to do business with – by allowing you to set appointments when you want, online.

Imagine it, it is in the evening, after the kids are in bed.  You are comfortable on the couch with a nice roaring fire and your laptop (or iPhone) open.  You have your beverage of choice at your side and you are able to actually cross items off your to-list as you make the appointment to get your hair colored and for your son to get his cut (finally).  Your beloved mutt desperately needs a bath after the recent bad weather – in a zip you have a grooming appointment set for tomorrow.  To be able to make short work of your to-list at your leisure…what a wonderous thing!

But wait – you are a small business owner too.  Maybe you aren’t a hair dresser, dog groomer, dentist, doctor, exterminator or repair person (because if you were this story wouldn’t make sense – you wouldn’t make an appointment with yourself!) but you are an accountant, lawyer, designer, photographer or personal trainer.   You have customers that have the same problem you do – they have making an appointment to see you is on their to-do list but they are too busy (or can’t get thru for some reason) to make an appointment by phone during regular business hours.  What is the cost to you of all those missed appointments?  And as more and more people move to using the Internet for convenience what is the cost going to be in the future?

If you haven’t considered adding self-service appointment scheduling technology to your website, now might be the time to do it.  In my next post I’ll talk about some of the vendors out there and the features of their services.  In the meantime, enjoy the fire and the beverage and think about how making  it easier for your customers to do business with you could help you bottom line.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dyanna/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

If you have spent any time in corporate America you are likely well acquainted with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite of products (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) and their close companion Visio.  How dependent on them have you become and what happens when you want (or need) to use one of the free competitors?

When I started my own small business last year I bought a new laptop that did not include Microsoft Office.  Though I had used the tools almost extensively for most of my professional career I decided, since my new PC didn’t come with Office, to try and use the free alternatives.  After all, many of my clients are in the same situation; what would I recommend to them?

Before we start, a few disclaimers.  This not a complete, formal or even impartial review. After many many years (I was 12 when I started) of using MS Office I have a lot of unlearning to do.  All those years of using MS Office has set expectations that may or may not be reasonable.

First,  I started using Google Docs (Document and Spreadsheet).  These work OK for very simple things.  With Document once I get into anything beyond rudimentary formatting I quickly become frustrated.  Something like adding a table then resizing the columns takes many more clicks than I am used to.  Spreadsheet is a little better; I can most of what I am used to doing.  At first I was worried that I couldn’t do graphing or Pivot tables but it appears that there are gadgets that do those things; I haven’t used them yet.   I scoffed at Presentation and didn’t even try it when I couldn’t figure out how to do slide transitions or animations (ok, does every presentation need them?  No, unless you are 9 years old.  As my son is.   Enough said.).   I am also concerned that you can’t embed fragments of Documents or Spreadsheets.

Next I tried Openoffice and at first glance I was pleasantly surprised with Calc; for me it was easy to use because it was so much like Excel.   Only little things were annoying (for example, the tab under the sort function that includes the option to specify a header row is a different tab from most of the rest of the sort options).  Writer is similar; simple things like resizing the columns in a table are as intuitive as click and drag.   Where I get aggravated with OpenOffice is with reliability and performance.  I consistently get crashes and have to recover documents.   One night I was helping my son with a school project and we were using Presentation (which, by the way, support transitions and animations).  Literally, we’d type one sentence and hit ’save’ because every other sentence we’d have a crash and have to recover the document.   The applications would also hang up a lot.

After a while I completely uninstalled Openoffice, re-downloaded it and re-installed it.   It seems to be a little better now but I have recovered at least twice already today while preparing this post.

I then tried the Zoho versions of these programs.   I don’t know if did something wrong or I was losing my mind but I would open a csv file, modify it and save it and export it; I NEVER got the resulting exported file to contain the correct modified data.  The problem might be related to the fact that Zoho really doesn’t support Safari, which I use most often.  After that I didn’t spend much time with the other Zoho applications.  I will at some point.  The media loves Zoho, I want to love Zoho too.  I just don’t yet.

The high point of my frustrations came when I wanted to do what I thought was very simple…print mailing labels based on addresses in a .csv file. OpenOffice?   I finally figured out how to do it but it crashed about 2/3 of the way thru the Mail Merge.  Google Docs?  If you can do it I couldn’t figure it out.  Zoho?   After my issues with spreadsheet I kind of gave up.   After many frustrated hours I moved to my husband’s PC, which has MS Office, and knocked out the labels in about 10 minutes.

As a techie, Visio has long been one of my favorite applications.  I consider myself the Viso queen.   Frankly, I’m afraid to try the free competitors at this point.  I imagine it would be painful.

What is the moral to this story?  First, unbeknownst to me, I have been trained (brainwashed?) into performing certain functions in a certain way; in fact I expect certain functions be available.   If you are in this camp, the learning curve costs of switching may be more expensive than the dollar cost of buying MS Office (cost of learning curve proportional to your age and the number of brain cells you’ve lost over time).  Second, despite my frustrations, I think with more modifications and enhancements these free alternatives will be viable choices for some folks; they are already viable choices for some tasks (I am using OpenOffice right now).   I plan to continue trying to use them; but may spring for Office to get me thru humps and gaps. Seems like someone could make a ton of money writing books that bridge the gap for old MS Office users like me…

What do YOU use for spreadsheets and word processing?