Growing Your Business in Difficult Economic Times

Cut costs, improve productivity, and actually GROW your business while your competition is operating in survival mode.

Whether you view the current situation in the global marketplace as a depression, a recession, or simply an economic crisis; no one can argue that there aren’t several important indicators of a worldwide economic downturn.

These include high oil prices, which contribute to both high food prices and a declining dollar value; a sub-prime mortgage crisis; increasing unemployment; the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers; a substantial credit shortage leading to the bankruptcy of several large and well established investment banks and an intervention totalling HUNDREDS of BILLIONS that has yet to slow plunging stock values or stabilize a faltering real estate market.

Each and every one of us has begun to feel the effects – in our neighborhoods, at the grocery store, in the job market…

What does all of this mean for your business? Should you let employees go? Put a freeze on hiring? Cut back on marketing? Backburner plans to explore new markets?

Trimming fat from your business is smart in lean times; but there is a danger of entering a downward spiral which leads to going out of business. When revenues are low you cut back on marketing – which brings less clients, which in turn decreases revenue further – leading to more cutbacks. A few cycles of this and you’ll be out of business.

It is only natural to revisit your overall business strategy when market conditions change, but it is important to recognize that slow economical conditions may offer a significant opportunity to improve your business model. Read more

Starting or Growing a Virtual Assistant Business

We got a comment on one of our Podcasts from a visitor named Collette Schultz. Her question about the Virtual Assistant industry is one we get pretty frequently, so I thought I’d include my reply here as a post.

Collette Schultz on October 26th, 2008 11:21 pm

As a new virtual assistant subcontractor I’m getting into researching the VA industry through podcasts. I listened to this one last week and am bound to hear more. What I find most frustrating is knowing where to start. Do you offer a beginners series to help getting started?

While we have never blogged or done a segment specifically on Virtual Assisting, I do not believe it differs greatly from other types of internet based businesses: that is to say that it relies mostly on abilities and training, networking, and marketing.

There are several places people can obtain training to become a virtual assistant or, as in Collette’s case, improve their existing skill base; some of them offer certification:

Certification Programs

• AssistU
• International Virtual Assistants Association (IVAA)
• VA Certification
• Certified Virtual Professional (Thanks to Collette for this resource!)

Our Jumpstart Kit is also intended to improve people’s fundamental skills with virtual teamwork and remote work technology. Also, Phil wrote a book called Lose Your Commute about finding legitimate work-from-home opportunities in general and it contains a lot of insights and resources. Read more

Dropping Outlook for Webmail (an update on my adventures in cloud computing)

It was almost a year ago when I posted about my 60 day experiment to stop using Outlook as my primary email program and contact manager and instead moved to a web-based email system. Several people commented on that posting and I felt it was time for an update.

Let me say that after having moved my email onto the web I have been much happier and accessing my email is much more flexible. In fact, that move has prompted me to move  other services I need, such as my calendar and to do list, to the cloud.

So let me briefly review what is no longer an experiment, but is now the new way I am working.  First off, as for email, although I started by using Yahoo Mail Plus – after about 4 months I decided to give Google Apps and Gmail a try.  There were a number of things I liked about Yahoo but there were some things that made me crazy too – such as often losing a message while writing it for no reason (the screen would just go blank), plus a big problem: the Yahoo Calendar. This is where Yahoo lost me as a user and Google won. Read more

Does your backup strategy include your cell phone?

While I know it’s probably not accurate (at least not as much as I’d like it to be), I’m going to assume that you have some type of backup system in place for your important data. You know those little things like the documents, email, and contacts you need to stay in business.  The sad truth is that many mobile workers and too few home offices have a good backup system in place.

There are plenty of options for backing up the data on your computer such as writeable CDs and DVDs, external USB hard drives, and affordable online backup services. And if you are smart you have some type of system in place – one that is automated and scheduled as much as possible so you don’t have to think about it. But is ALL the data you need to be up and running easily restored?

How about all the contacts on your cell phone?  Have you found the best way to back up your cell phone address book? If you lost your phone or it was stolen could you restore them easily to a new phone?

Read more

Tools for running a business online

A few days ago I came across a recently published list of 270+ tools and apps for running a business online. Whether you are a small business owner, entrepreneur, or solopreneur you are bound to find something useful in this list.  It is broken down into categories covering topics such as accounting & billing, calendars & scheduling, collaboration, contact management, online meetings, project management, and virtual offices among many others.

Although no list like this can be exhaustive (we currently use some tools not on this list) – there were plenty here I have never come across before. If you’re looking to be more mobile and increase your ability to work where and when you want I encourage you to give this list a gander and consider which ones might be able to improve your business and workflow.

Tools like these were previously only available to organizations with large budgets. Thanks to them becoming more affordable small businesses can now truly work from anywhere.

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