What if…

• You have an IT services firm and, despite having a backup and recover plan, you have a major outage and a large number of your customers lose their websites?  Do you say “oh well, we recovered what we could” or do you say “we will make it right and rebuild those sites for you”?  How much would that cost?
• You own a restaurant and your connectivity to your credit card processor goes down and you have no backup method for taking cards.  Do you revert to “cash only”?  How much would that lost business cost?
• You are a professional photographer and you drop and break the external hard drive that houses all your photos for the past 5 years – including the ones from last nights wedding photo shoot?  What is the cost of this loss?
• You are a lawyer whose files are now ruined by the fire that broke out in the office next door and quickly spread through the building?  What is the cost of recovering (if you can) copies of what was in those files?
• You own a consulting firm and the day before your monthly billing run you lose the computer that had the billing records for the whole month.  How long before you can bill your clients correctly?

I read an interesting article on CMSWire today called In the Cloud, the Role of IT Changes.  The opening argument was that now most companies, large and small, outsource things like wiring, copier support, phone support and the other “crawl on the floor to connect wires” type of IT work.  Now that they are also starting to move applications away from their premise and to the cloud, what role is there for IT in a small or medium sized organization.

I agree with the conclusion that IT will not go away.   The activities that IT folks do will change from installing, supporting and monitoring applications in house to choosing and managing vendors and external applications and making sure any integration work.  IT resources will be aligned more tightly with the business and focus on how the business uses the software and how the software might be configured to be most efficient.

In fact, as technology becomes more strategic for companies, the IT roles becomes more strategic and less “cost of doing business”.  How can your business best leverage emerging technologies?  What is your level of risk in various circumstances and how can you mitigate that risk?  Are you signed up for the appropriate level of service for your company?  Have you negotiated the best possible deal?

The points in the article are all good but how does this apply to small business?  I think it leads to a number of questions that each business owner has to address:

• do I have the time and knowledge to make technology decisions?
• do I have the time and knowledge to choose, negotiate with and manage any number of vendors?
• do I have the time and knowledge to integrate the solutions my business needs?

  by  philcampbell 

Didn’t get enough buzzwords last week?  Not to worry, I am here to fill the big gaping void in your week!  Here are more buzzwords that every small business owner should know.

Lets get started!

1. Business intelligence – CIO.com defines business intelligence or BI as “… an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data”.  So what does that mean?   Generally it means going beyond straight transactional reporting to using data to  improve decision making, cut costs or identify new business opportunities.  It generally entails merging data from various sources and looking at data over time to identify trends, etc.  You use BI to answer questions like “who is my most profitable customer” or “which is my costliest route”.  I talked about BI in this post.
2. Cloud computing – there are lots of definitions but mine is this:  any computing resource that you use that isn’t on your desk or in your office.  For example, this blog is physically stored on a server that I think is in New Mexico.  Heck, I am not entirely sure where it is.  Where it is NOT is in Dunwoody, GA – hence it is in the cloud.  If you use Gmail, Evernote, Dropbox or any other software as a service (SaaS – another good buzzword) program you are “in the cloud”.  You can read more about the cloud here and here.
3. CRM – stands for customer relationship management.   It is a business function, usually supported by technology, designed to improve interactions with customers.   It allows a business to, in one place, keep track of interactions and communications with a customer like inquiries, complaints, phone calls, emails, and transactions.  It can help marketing, sales and customer service stay on the same page when dealing with customers and prospects.   I wrote a few posts about CRM you can read here and here.  If you go beyond traditional CRM that and start to keep track of a customer’s online behaviors thru social media like Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and the like you are dabbling in Social CRM (see, another free buzzword for the price of one!).  There is a great article that describes social CRM here.
4. ERP – is the acronym for enterprise resource planning and it refers to an integrated system that manages most of the business functions of an organization.  It can include finance and accounting, HR, supply chain management, project management, CRM and more.  ERP solutions for small businesses include NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics and a plethora of smaller niche applications.  There are so many choices it can be confusing – Laurie McCabe has a good article on how to choose the right business applications.

What does all this mean?

All of these buzzwords should be in your technology plan – if you aren’t using them now you will want to use them in the near future.  If you aren’t sure how to get started or don’t even have a technology plan, get help.  These are all tools to help your business grow and be effective.  And who doesn’t want that?

  by  revbean

I know, I know, the technology world is rife with slang, jargon and acronyms.   In fact we’re famous for being almost impossible for the layman to understand – I’ve been using words with no vowels for longer than I care to admit.  That said, some of these terms are important for a business owner to understand – if for no other reason than to make sure their business has what it needs.

So let’s get started!

1. Backup and recovery – the verb phrase “to back up” means that you make a copy of your data so that if you lose it you can replace it.  The noun “backup” is the copy you made and the act of replacing it is “recovery”.  You can back up your data on any sort of schedule – monthly, weekly, daily, hourly or even more frequently.  I usually recommend making a backup at least daily.  There are a lot of ways to back up your data – to a USB drive or other external hard drive, to a CD or DVD or to the cloud.  Services like Mozy and Carbonite are a business owner’s best friend.  Here are a couple other thoughts on backup and recovery:  First, make sure you are backing up everything you should be.  I had an outage about a year ago and realized I was backing up everything except my email.  Ouch!  Next, test your recovery.  If I had done that I would have realized I was taking incomplete backups BEFORE I got bitten.
2. Redundancy – redundancy essentially means duplication.  A system is redundant if services are split in two or more pieces so that if one fails you have something to fall back on.  It is important to think about your technology and to determine where and when you need redundancy.  If you are a small business owner with only a single pc your redundancy plan might be to go to Office Depot and buy a new pc.  Then you could use the backup from number 1 to be back in business in a few hours.  If you are a larger business or are looking to push technology services to the cloud you may have deeper needs.  When you talk to service providers ask them about their redundancy and look for two things:  first is hardware redundancy which means that they have split your services over multiple machines so that if they lose one you are still good to go.  Also ask about location redundancy – what if oh, for example, Hurricane Irene slammed into their data center?  Do they have services in another, preferably far away, location that can keep your business up and running?
3. Archiving – to archive means to save off old data that you want to keep around but don’t need ready access to.  Archiving is closely related to back up and recovery but with a subtle twist.  When you are archive you may choose to copy your data to a medium that isn’t as easy or fast to recover from and that is separate from your current data.  An example of this would be where you back up your current data to the cloud for fast and simple recovery but you put your really old stuff on a DVD and store it offsite.  It is important to consider what needs to be archived – you may not want to pay to back up and store all that old data every night and you certainly won’t want to add time to recover it in the event something bad happens.
4. Disaster recovery – Wikipedia says “ is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster”.  Your disaster recover plan will include your backup, recovery, redundancy and archiving plans.  It is the technology portion of your overall business continuity plan.

What does all this mean?

  by  Roger Smith

Technology has advanced so much in the past few years – I can’t imagine a world with no internet on my phone, no ability to make dinner reservations online (love Opentable!), no easy way to get directions or maps when I need them or no Angry Birds.  Yet every once in a while I get slapped upside the head with a business process that is, well there is no nice way to say it, so 1990s.

I recently took one of my dogs to the vet – no, this article isn’t about my vet.  They are fairly high tech and progressive (shout out to them!).  As part of completing the check-up I had to get new supplies of various medicines, including heartworm preventative.  Merial, the maker of the heartworm medicine, was offering a $12 rebate if you bought a certain minimum number of dosages.

Going Back in Time

Here is where things got a little surreal.  The process to get the rebate was this:  vet has to give me an extra receipt.  I had to fill in a paper form, attach the receipt and mail to Merial.  Then I have to wait 6-8 weeks for processing.

Really?

There Has to Be a Better Way

Why couldn’t I fill in a form online with some sort of code from my vet receipt?  Or why not allow me to scan the receipt and attach it to the online form?  And why on earth does it take 6-8 weeks to process anything these days?  Other than making sure I’m not sending in multiple copies, what is there to process exactly?  The de-duplicating can easily be done by computer and then it is a matter sending a transaction to an accounts payable system to cut me a check.  Heck, maybe they could have been really out there and deposited the money in my PayPal account.

Ok, so maybe I’m cheap – I did fill out the form and send it in to get my $12.  Unfortunately I’m left with an unfavorable impression of Merial – which is probably not fair because there is a 99% chance that someone else is actually processing their rebates.  In addition – Merial likely had a marketing goal tied to those rebates.  How many folks do what I almost did and just throw it away because it was too much trouble?

Time to Look at Our Own Businesses

This got me thinking – how many of our business processes are inconvenient for our customers?  How many of them leave our customers with an unfavorable impression?  How can a business owner use technology to make things easier for their customers?

By the way, this is Jester, my old girl.   She probably doesn’t need a year’s worth of heartworm preventative anyway but we can always hope!

Earlier this week there was an article on SmallBizTechnology.com about how the biggest problem small businesses have in using technology is lack of education.  I absolutely agree with the sentiment – who has time to learn about technology when they have a business to run?  In the article Ramon Ray recommended spending an hour or two a week learning about technology.  From there, however, he talked a lot about technology that boosts a businesses online presence – Facebook, blogging, Twitter and local search.  These are all important but there is so much more!

So what else should a small business owner educate themselves about?  There are so many topics that it can seem like a maze but if you take a look at this list you can concentrate on a few topics at a time:

• How can you make things easier for your customer?  (easy online access to content and services)
• How can you make things easier for your staff? (remote access, simple processes, collaboration tools)
• How can you touch more prospects, close more sales and increase revenue? (CRM, email newsletters)
• How can you streamline your internal processes and maybe save money? (better integration, fewer but more powerful systems, remote hosting, cloud services)
• How can you get a better handle on your business? (reporting, analytics)

So here is a short round-up of good sources for technology information – these are examples but they should give you somewhere to start:

• online technology magazines and blogs like smallbiztechnology.com and smallbusinesscomputing.com.  I also like Laurie McCabe’s blog.
• industry specific online sources like the Law Technology News section of Law.com or Techtips on TheProgressiveAccountant.com
• online communities like American Express Open and Biznik.com
• local blogs like atlantasmall.biz

What technology topics would you like to know more about?  Where do you go to get your technical education?

by  Lynchburg College Archives

In today’s installment of my series on small business growing plains I am going to talk about the order-to-cash cycle.  When a business is new it is easy to get so excited about the first sale that as soon as an order is received or a contract signed the business owner immediately sends out the associated invoice or statement.  Those simple documents are full of symbolism for the nascent concern – you are for real!  You have real customers and can bring in real money!  Woo hoo!

The Order-to-Cash Conundrum

As you get bigger and busier it is easy to put off creating those all-important documents that a)represent potential income to your company and b) signal your customer to pay you.  Maybe you don’t have time to create them more than once a week, or worse, once a month.  All of a sudden getting paid is taking longer and longer.  Even if you get administrative or bookkeeping help you’ll likely settle on a set schedule for billing, perhaps once a week, that doesn’t jive with when you actually sold the order or the contract.

When you get even bigger and busier it can get worse – let’s say now you have sales people to sell orders or contract work.  Or that you have field service technicians that have to do the work that in turn leads to an order.  These guys have paperwork to get filled out and they may not be in the office every day so it is easy for that paperwork to be delayed and then, when it is finally turned it, it may be incorrect and require a cycle of rework.  Now your invoices and statements are even MORE delayed.  Add that to the fact that your customers aren’t always in a hurry to pay you right away and you suddenly have a cash flow problem.

How can you avoid or rectify this ever-lengthening order-to-cash black hole?

Order or Contract Entry

There are a number of ways to improve the order or contract entry process :

• Keep your sales customer information in sync with your accounting customer information.  This can make it quicker and easier to set up a new account for billing and make sure you apply the order or contract to the correct billing customer.  You can keep them in sync thru manual processes or by integrating your customer relationship management system with your accounting system.  Some applications integrate easily, others may require some help from a technical resource.
• Provide mechanisms to allow your sales or field service folks to enter contracts or sales orders online.  This can be as simple as having them upload a spreadsheet to a specified place to as fancy as an application that they can access remotely, maybe even from a mobile device.  The quicker you can get the contract or order entered into your billing application the faster you can get invoices out.  Where possible cut out paper altogether; if it isn’t possible to go paperless try to change your process to match paper to online records on the back end.
• Incent your sales and field service folks to enter their information online quickly and correctly.  Quite simply, if you can’t bill your customer maybe they shouldn’t get paid.  Hmm, just a thought.

Invoice Creation

• Simplify invoice or statement creation.  Avoid “special” invoices for customers and make sure any invoice or statement can be easily produced from your accounting software.  If your accounting software doesn’t do this you might want to look for a system that does or look for a billing system that integrate with what you have.
• If you can put invoice creation on “auto-pilot” where it runs on a regular schedule all on its own, do so.  If you can’t, adjust the back office processes to create invoices on a regular, frequent basis.  How regular and frequent?  It depends on your cash flow needs but daily, if it isn’t a complicated process, might not be too often.

It is easy for the order, contract and billing processes to get in the way of getting the customer a timely invoice.  Beyond prolonging the time until you get paid, what kind of message does a tardy invoice send your customer?  That you are unorganized?  That their business isn’t important?

If you think there are ways to improve your order-to-cash cycle, contact your technical advisor.  He or she can help you review your current processes and talk about where improvements, both manual and automated, might be in order.

If you thought this post was helpful you may want to check out the rest in this series so far.

• Can you keep up with your customer’s service needs?
• Are you addicted to spreadsheets?
• How long does it take to set up a new customer?

by  Arbron

Don’t act innocent, you know what I mean.  Spreadsheet software is oh so easy to use and so inexpensive (or even free).  You can use it to keep your company books, to keep your budget and forecast, to keep lists of customers, to create invoices, to create sales orders, reporting and analytics, inventory…the list goes on and on.

It is time for a spreadsheet intervention!

Following are the top 10 reasons you should stop and reconsider the use of spreadsheets in your business:

1. Sometimes the creator of the spreadsheet doesn’t know what they are doing and the calculations are incorrect.
2. If you make changes to values on a spreadsheet and save it you no longer know what the original value was.  Unless you saved a version off first, creating yet another spreadsheet.
3. If you have lots of versions, on hard drives, in email, on various computers you have no single version of the truth – whose spreadsheet is right?
4. Often the creator of the spreadsheet leaves it on the hard drive of the computer.  And often that hard drive isn’t backed up.
5. While we are on the subject of security risks, what do you think happens to all those spreadsheets you mail around?  Any idea where they go?
6. As you put more and more stuff into your spreadsheet the more unwieldy it becomes.
7. As you put more and more stuff into your spreadsheet and make multiple copies because of versioning you are now eating up disk space.  Every day.
8. They waste time.  If you pay someone to do a repetitive task in a spreadsheet, add up how much time they spend on it each week.  Then find out how much it would cost to automate that task.  The numbers are usually enlightening.
9. The second you save the spreadsheet the data is old.  Inventory is not up to date, customer contact information isn’t accurate, accounts are stale.
10. It isn’t scalable.  You can’t continue to use spreadsheets as an integral part of your business for very long without running into roadblocks from bad or inaccurate data or the sheer manhours required to keep up with them.  Your company will grow, I’m sure of it, and if you rely heavily on spreadsheets you will get mired in the muck at some point.
11. You can’t easily integrate the data from one spreadsheet to another.  So you copy and paste date, duplicating it and opening it up to errors or staleness.

See I couldn’t stop at 10.  I could go on even further but I think I’ve made my point.

Today’s business owners are fortunate – there are software solutions for most business needs and small businesses can get great functionality for free or low-cost.  CRM systems to keep up with customers, accounting systems for your numbers, inventory application and the rest are plentiful, have great functionality and have been tested to ensure the data and information they produce is correct.

I am not a spreadsheet hater – I think there are good uses for spreadsheets.  One time financial or what-if analysis.  As a front-end to a database for more detailed analysis and reporting.  For lists.  But not as an integral part of running a business of any size.  Its just not good business.

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:

When was the last time you took a look at your small business’s website?  I bet you set it up a few (or maybe not so few!) years ago, spurred on by your nephew, daughter, or friend and have not done anything to it since.  As part of your spring cleaning you should take a pass thru your website to see if it is up-to-date and correct.  Better yet, consider hiring a professional (usually a marketing professional) to give it a once over.  Don’t be afraid that they may want to redo the entire site – they may well suggest that.  That is how they make a living, after all!  Insist that they just do a review with a list of suggestions and a cost to implement each suggestion.  Pick what seems appropriate to you and that you can afford.  You may even be able to make some of the changes yourself.  Areas to consider:

• It sounds simple but I bet I can pull up 10 websites and at least 9 of them are dated earlier than 2010.  If I am a potential customer and see your website hasn’t been updated since 2007, it doesn’t give me warm, fuzzy feelings about your business.  Having no date isn’t a great option either; customers and prospects want to know that you are keeping up with things in and with your business.
• Re-read the text; does it still make sense today?  Does it still have the same voice you want to have represent your business?  Or is it too stilted and formal?  Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has driven the Internet to a less formal, more intimate voice.  You should still be professional online but you may want to consider your language in relation to changes happening on the Internet.
• Are your products, services and prices up to date?  You should certainly update them if they are not.  If you don’t specify your products, services or prices you may want to consider adding them.
• Consider adding links to social media (and diving into social media if you aren’t already there).
• Make sure you site is search engine friendly – and by that I mean with today’s search engines.  The search algorithms change constantly; your site might have performed well in 2007 but might not now.
• Update graphics or photos if they look dated.
• Make sure you site is loading quickly.  Not only does this add to a better user experience, the search engines are starting to “grade” sites on their performance.  Slow-to-load sites will be penalized.
• Your customers and prospects want to know about who they are doing business with.  Consider adding an ‘about us’ section and be sure to include affiliations, etc.
• Finally, make it easy for folks to contact you.  So many sites force users to use their sign up form – this is a convenience for the site owner businesses, NOT for the user.  Sure, it automatically updates your email list but if I want to talk to someone NOW I want to have a phone number available or an email address I can use directly.

These are a few ideas for “spring cleaning” your website, to add a little spit and polish to your online presence.  If you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them!