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 These days being a technophobe must be getting difficult if not downright impossible. As I squint at the screen on the mobile phone Vodafone thought I should so impressed with (which has a keypad with keys so small only a toddler’s fingers are suitable) at my emails or the tiny font size that appears when you surf the net I remember fondly as a lad trying to phone home struggling with buttons A & B in a public telephone box. Mind you, in those days the coin boxes weren’t ripped out and they weren’t all used as handy toilets - but then that’s the irony of modernity - we supposedly have a better life but it comes with unpleasant things like the deterioration in people’s behaviour, political correctness, processed food and MDF furniture!
Meeting an existing or prospective customer or the staff in your branch office can easily be done from your desk, your car or your home. Fuel is not going to get cheaper, so investing in the tools that will allow you to stay put while doing business is bound to be a good one. In fact, it doesn't even have to be an investment, as there are quite a few excellent, free solutions out there:
Skype, for one, allows you to call landlines anywhere in the world at ridiculously lost cost. Should your contact own a Skype account too, conferencing and video-conferencing are completely free.
 LogMeIn allows you to remote control your (or someone else's) desktop or printer (meaning you can print at the office from your home or even your mobile phone). Other web-based applications like GoToMeeting cost the organiser very little per year and are free to use for participants (i.e. your client).
The price of motoring keeps on rising, so why not ensure better productivity and cut costs with employees off-site or working from home? Unified communications systems can allows workers to answer incoming calls, conference and collaborate no matter where they happen to be working with the customers none the wiser!
Telecommuting also allows ‘hot-desking”, which strangely enough we used in a firm I worked for in the early 1980’s - if we didn’t go out and work at a client’s premises there was nowhere to sit or work! Imagine the savings in rent!
If you're still sending your invoices and other correspondence by post, have you asked yourself why?
Reducing postage to the bare minimum (for anything that isn't a document) not only saves on stamps but on admin time too. Consider how long it takes to print a letter, find the envelope, put a stamp on it (maybe check the weight too) and then travel to the box or the post office. Now compare it to pressing the 'send' button on your email program, then multiply the difference by the number of letters you send every day, then by the hourly rate of your administrator... That's right, we're talking big bucks here.
Try Cute PDF or Primo PDF: both are free) software that creates a PDF printer on your machine. Nowadays every computer comes with a PDF reader of some sort (and they are free to download too) so there will not be any argument about 'not being able to open the file'. Having such a tool has the added advantage of being able to easily email big files to anyone as they are saved in a much more compact size.
Is your newsletter still printed on paper? Do you realise that it could cost you 80% less to make it electronic? Not to mention that it could also reach a wider audience, as email is easily forwarded (but no-one is ever going to photocopy your newsletter and send it to a friend to share, no matter how good it is).
There is very little reason, nowadays, not to use email for pretty much everything. Even contracts can be signed electronically (and so have been legally binding for over ten years), so why bother with paper and stamps? Try EchoSign for a solution.
When a document is too large for an email, use YouSendIt, free for files up to 100Mb.
Paying your bills and doing your banking online will save you not only on postage, but you'll see your bank charges go down as well. If your cash-flow is tight, you'll avoid quite a few bad surprises by checking your balance online rather than wait to get the paper statement – potentially saving heaps on overdraft fees!
Not only that but if you encourage your customers to pay you on-line too you’ll get paid quicker and save on those tedious trips to the bank make deposits!
I recently heard of a technophobic business captain who, while on business trip, had his secretary print all his emails and fax it to his hotel room in India. You can only imagine the size of their telephone bill that month.
Okay, perhaps he hadn't yet invested in a laptop (although why on earth not?) but he did have a modern mobile phone though. It takes 6 minutes to set your mobile up to receive a copy of all your emails on it and three minutes to browse the internet.
Whilst some businesses still insist on using fax, it doesn't mean that you need to have one too. There are a few fax-to-email conversion services which will allow you to send and receive fax in PDF format using your inbox - some completely free!
That's by far the biggest, most difficult one to achieve. It could also be one of the most cost-efficient. The decision to go paperless is the easiest part of the job, then comes the challenge – meaning someone is going to get very busy for a while.
Once implemented, the paper monster will need never bother you again – he'll have gone out in the trash with the rest of the stuff. Not only will you have a lot of extra space in your office (maybe allowing you to move to cheaper premises?) but you will be saving a lot on your admin costs too.
There are dozens of articles out there about how to make the transition to paperless, some giving you an easy to follow step-by-step approach, others recommending some useful tools to implement it and stay with it.
You don’t need to spend money on a fancy Document Management system or software if you’re disciplined about where you store your documents. Just create an ordered system of folders by year, customer or purpose into which you can store all your emails, Word or Excel documents and use the US date system (yes, annoying as these are being back to front but you’ll soon get the hang of it!) so everything is filed in chronological order. Getting a cheap scanner will enable you to scan on & file any documents created externally.
If you're about to launch a new business then start paperless and never have to deal with the hassle of going paper-free, plus make the huge savings from the word go.
With time spent by people on Facebook alone threatening to overtake that of television, there is absolutely no doubt that the internet is the place to be if you want to be recognised. Not only is it cheaper to do so, but it also allows easy and accurate tracking of the results.
Google Places is like a free website: you can create a mini-profile, upload photos and add links to You-Tube, so you can add a video too!
There's never been a better time to be social either. Consider how much it would cost you to set up a profile for your business and publicise to your target audience. The answer is: not a cent (Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, to name a few, are completely free). This makes social media is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available at present. Provided you give it just a little bit of effort, it will pay back big time.
Some will say that often the technology costs more than the savings it's supposed to achieve. What do you think?
Microsoft Office is the prime example. It's expensive to buy and then you have to renew your license, keep it up to date, etc. A current version of MS Office will cost you $450 per computer.
Have you thought about open source technology? OpenOffice offers most features of MS Office (document, spreadsheet, drawing, presentation, etc.) and is absolutely free as well as perfectly safe. In fact, it has the reputation of being more stable than its Microsoft counterpart. It is also more flexible, as you can customise it to suit your needs using (free) extensions developed by other people like you around the globe. You will be able to save documents in any format that you like (including PDF), making anything you do with it 100% compatible with anyone else, be they on Mac or PC.
Cloud computing can be another worthwhile cost saving option, although not yet widely used. Think about having all your software and server space owned and hosted elsewhere. No more backup necessary, no more expensive software licence and the ability to have you and your staff work from absolutely anywhere in the world - provided of course they have an internet connection.
Statistically, 80% of businesses which have been the victim of fire shut down within the next 6 months. The insurance may pay off, but it's the data loss that gets them. Now think about it: if everything had been saved elsewhere, you could still be running business as usual the day after. Let's be realistic: who backs up all their data every day? Some don't do it at all – I know you're out there.
Obviously, with all your documents being held elsewhere, you may be concerned about security and confidentiality. Here's one for you then: if you have an internet connection and a server, you are more at risk to be hacked than anyone using GoogleApps – as their level of protection is way higher than the one you can afford.
Mind you, your data may be held on a server in Christchurch, or like the ABAC website, hosted on a server in Melbourne. Guess what happened when Melbourne flooded!
If you do your own recruiting, use Trade Me and/or Seek, which will only cost you a fraction of the cost of newspaper advertising – no matter how long or short your ad needs to be.
In addition, Trade Me can be a very effective way of advertising your goods and services.
So whether you’re a technophile or a technophobe, technology is here to stay and can save you heaps of money! Be wary, though, and let someone else waste their time & money on technology for technology’s sake. Microsoft’s Vista (which has been widely shunned by most) is a very good example of why some technology is best avoided!
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5- CUT DOWN ON FAX USE
6- PAPERLESS OFFICE
7- FREE INTERNET MARKETING
9 - CLOUD COMPUTING 