Category be eco-friendly

Entries 20 Total

The World Without US

Oct 15, ’07 10:39 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Green/Eco-Friendly, Small Business / SOHO, be eco-friendly

I would like to recommend a book to you on this Blog Action Day For Our Environment. The book:

The World Without Us written by Alan Weisman (ISBN 978-1-905264-03-2).

It is not immediately obvious that this book is about our climate, it offers a fascinating glimpse of what would happen to the earth if humans vanished today, forever. Most importantly, would our planet ever fully recover? Bill McKibben, author of the End of Nature called it:

“… This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, …..”

He is right, I understand now that to really heal the wounds, we as humans have inflicted on this planet, we must cut our world population in half. This is a stark reality to open your eyes to, but it is a also the only way. We have the choice to do it ourselves or have our plant do it for us, in a very unpleasant way.

We can reduce our impact immediately, and we can heal our planet in the next 100 year. ST.

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Blog Action Day For Our Environment: WinWeb Pledge

Oct 15, ’07 9:57 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Green/Eco-Friendly, Small Business / SOHO, be eco-friendly

In August I signed up for the Blog Action Day for our Environment, and today is the day. So I’ll be posting some articles about the environment. First up, what WinWeb will do to minimise the effects of small business on the environment.

In June of this year, I decided to think about ways to make our own company carbon neutral. I started discussing the concept in my company and we developed what we call ClimateByte Technology by WinWeb.

We were determent to take our vision, of becoming carbon neutral, to our clients and get them involved. So in August after signing up to this blog action day, we made the following pledge:

WinWeb pledges to plant one tree every year for each paying customer that signs up to our subscription service via the WinWeb website and remains a customer for longer than one year – this will reduce your carbon footprint and make your home-office or office workstation more than carbon neutral. We make this pledge initially up to the end of 2008. Each tree will reduce your carbon footprint by about 730kg CO2 – and that is just the start of it!

This is only one of ten ways by which we help small business to become carbon neutral and more eco-friendly, you can read the other nine points here.

We realise that the success of saving our environment for us and our children, starts with the choices we make everyday, however small. ST.

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Bookkeeping for Small Business

Oct 12, ’07 6:33 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Accounting, Entrepreneur, Failure, Health Check, Marketing/PR, Outsourcing, Small Business / SOHO, Software as a Service, Work/Life Balance, avoid growing pain, be eco-friendly, be successful, bootstrap, do a SWOT plan, do a reality check, do bookkeeping., do cost cutting, do credit control, grow your business, handle problems, lower overheads, market and sell, outsource effectively, plan cash-flow, plan your business, use online IT

I have discussed before that it is important for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants, to do a minimum of business planning, but does it stop there?

Not really, you need to keep up to date with your bookkeeping, to complete the business planning process. You may ask why, if you have done the planning, why not get your bookkeeping done once a year for your tax return?

The answer to this question is the business planning process never ends. Remember I have been talking about going back to your plan at least once a month. In order to fine-tune your small business planning you need to actual information how your business performed in the last month. The only way to do that is to do your bookkeeping or accounting.

By doing that you will be able to compare your predicted numbers in your cash-flow with the actual number your business has generated. This in turn will help you to update or modify your cash-flow plan for the future. More important than that, you will learn new things about your business:

  • You may have higher (good) or lower (bad) sales, than you expected?
  • Your cost in your business may be higher (bad) or lower (better) than you expected?
  • Your cash-flow may be better or worse do to the above two points?
  • You may need to outsource some business processes to lower your fixed cost structure, to make your business more recession proof or just more profitable?
  • You may need to ramp up your sales and marketing activities for your small business products or services?
  • You may also have to adjust your SWOT analysis and your business goals?

You will be surprised how creative you can be, once you know about and understand a problem in your business plan. It may not even be a problem at that time, you may just need to adjust the way you do things, and you may have avoided a small or big problem in the future.

In my opinion strict cost control and bootstrapping are not like nice to have features, they are essential for your small business survival. Often the difference between failure and success is just a little planning and checking the “plan” – doing a reality check. There is no excuse not to do it, all the tools are available for free, for anyone.

If you feel the initial process of business planning is too much for you, than get your accountant or bookkeeper to help you to set your cash-flow fore-casting, SWOT analysis with you, doing it online will give you strategic advantages, like you can work with your accountant or bookkeeper in real time in different places, this lowers your cost, no time wasted and is good for the environment.

I would like to make one more point here, the aim of all this planning is not to get it spot on – no, the aim is to understand what is happening in your business, that is why you should be doing it.

Among other things, it will give you a measure of certainty, security and confidence, if you understand what is happening in your business. So, how confident are you about the future of your business? Why not take the weekend and have a planning session, it is like playing monopoly, only this game will secure your future. ST.

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SaaS Benefits for Business Start-Up and Small Business

Aug 28, ’07 3:17 PM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Data Security, Development, E-Commerce, Entrepreneur, Exporting, Green/Eco-Friendly, Home Business, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Marketing/PR, Mobile Technology, Office - IT, Outsourcing, Sales, Small Business / SOHO, Software as a Service, Start-Up, Web Technology, WinWeb, avoid growing pain, be eco-friendly, be successful, bootstrap, choose your office, do a SWOT plan, do bookkeeping., do cost cutting, do credit control, export, grow your business, keep data safe, lower overheads, market and sell, outsource effectively, plan cash-flow, plan your business, start-up in business, use online IT

Starting and running a small business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal business today, is all about staying focused on the small business and not on running your office. WinWeb’s Software as a Service applications allow you to do exactly that. Below you will find some of the benefits detailed to help you make up your mind if this kind of technology is for you.

1. No More Software Installation.

Since our software comes to you via your internet browser, there is no need to install anything. Your printer will also work with our software without installation or any modifications. Our software works with any web browser, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox etc.

2. Our software is always up to date.

This really is one of the main benefits of SaaS. We make all the software updates on our servers, so you don’t have to do anything. No update hassle and worry anymore. There are no “Update available – Please download” messages and no CDs / DVDs updates arriving in the mail.

3. Never pay for software “updates” again!

No matter if we update or bug-fix, you will never have to pay for them again, it is all part and parcel of our service. Artificially accelerated software cycles are a thing of your past.

4. Fully Compatible with any Operating System.

Our software runs on any Operating System (OS) with Linux, Mac, Windows and some others – you login and use it.

5. Work and collaborate with anyone, anytime and anywhere.

Our software allows you to work with your accountant, colleagues, virtual assistants and others in real-time at anytime – whatever your business needs.

6. No commuting. No time wasting.

With online technology you can work from anywhere, so no need to travel to an office. Run your small business from home and benefit in terms of time, money and investment.

7. No security problems. No business interruption problem.

Your data is continuously backed up onto multiple RAID-5 data servers in multiple physically and network secure data centers – if that is not enough you can make a copy of your data anytime onto your PC or a CD.
Should your computer crash or get stolen – no problem, just log on to another computer and keep working – can your competition do that?

8. 24/7 Live Support 365 days a year.

We believe that you will be busy during the day with your clients and with working on new projects and so you should – after the phone stops ringing you get down to your admin work. So we thought we better be around in case you need some support for any of our products. It would be no good if we weren’t around now, would it?

9. No contract needed.

No minimum term, cancel anytime, no contract needed and you can test drive any software for a minimum of 30 days free of charge. This puts you in control. Unlike the boxed software you buy, once you paid for it, it’s yours including the problems. Not so with our software.

10. ClimateByte™ Technology

Our environment is in trouble – by using our on-demand Small Business Infrastructure™, you can help to reduce your carbon footprint and help our environment – we are dedicated to develop our future products and services with this in mind.

Our Software as a Service products provide your small business with a on-demand Small Business Infrastructure™ helping you to concentrate on your business, while we run your office and IT. This makes your business more mobile and competitive while saving you time, money and helping the environment.

When you run a small business and personal business, like contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants you probably benefit even more from using SaaS technology – program your business for success.

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Small Business Infrastructure For Business Start-Up.

Aug 28, ’07 12:42 PM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Accountants/CPAs, Accounting, Business Ideas, Contractor, DIY Business, Data Security, Development, E-Commerce, Employment, Entrepreneur, Exporting, Finance, Franchise, Freelancer, Generation-Y, Globalization 3.0, Green/Eco-Friendly, Health Check, Home Business, How to ..., Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Lifestyle, Marketing/PR, Mobile Technology, MumEntrepreneur, Office - IT, Outsourcing, Personal Business, Red-Tape, Relationships, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, Sales, Self-employed, Small Business / SOHO, Social Entrepreneur, Software as a Service, Sole-Trader, Start-Up, Suppliers, Virtual Assistants, Web Technology, WinWeb, WinWeb Live™, Work/Life Balance, avoid growing pain, be eco-friendly, be successful, bootstrap, choose your office, deal with taxes, do a SWOT plan, do a reality check, do bookkeeping., do cost cutting, do credit control, export, find funding, grow your business, handle problems, keep data safe, lower overheads, market and sell, motivate your staff, outsource effectively, plan cash-flow, plan your business, start-up in business, use online IT

I get regular questions about what we really mean by WinWeb’s Small Business Infrastructure?

On-demand Small Business Infrastructure™ centers around the idea that business start-ups and growing small businesses need help with numerous administrative tasks that are not core to the business success – such as bookkeeping, it services, internet services, call handling and other such services.

These services – if performed by the business owner – cause a great deal of time wasting – while the fixed cost of a business is still accumulating. This is in our minds a fatally floored business model and can easily be remedied with our infrastructure approach.

We should not expect business start-ups and small business in general to be accountants, bookkeepers, lawyers, marketing & PR gurus and so on. We should provide small business with an infrastructure in which it can concentrate on core business tasks, while at the same time enabling the business owner to stay informed of all relevant business facts like cash flow, sales, HR issues, tax position and more. This will enable him / her to make informed decisions, maybe with the help of an external advisor.

Based on these facts, we have devised a six point on-demand Small Business Infrastructure™ concept, which consist of:

1. WinWeb On-Demand Software Solutions – Anywhere At Anytime.

AccountsOffice and OnlineOffice are our two software offerings, which are based on the SaaS – Software as a Services model, to allow for the following key business benefits:

• tight inclusion of business advisors from the start,
• cultivating outsourcing techniques at the outset, i.e. virtual assistants,
• no IT knowledge needed and hassle free operation,
• real-time multi-user access from anywhere, increasing mobility.

2. WinWeb 24/7 Live Support – We Are Here For You Always.

Providing customer care and support only during business hours is not acceptable to our clients. Experience has shown us that most admin work gets done by small business before nine in the morning or after five in the evening. This practice is essential if the business is to survive it’s early years.

This is why we have provided our much acclaimed customer support for 24 hours a day, seven days a week from the outset. Saving our clients wasted time and money – while setting new standards in customer support. No manuals need to be read – all problems can be solved in real-time online.

3. WinWeb Live – Networking Community for Small Business Only.

To foster collaboration and outsourcing we have expanded our WinWeb Live™ offering to allow for small business community networking – thus enabling the business owner to make decisions about his / her current needs, with the following benefits:

• timeshare virtual assistants for professional results,
• offer contracts of work to contractors on a case-by-case basis,
• promote the business to a large audience or even locally,
• find new work and contracts online

4. Business Advice

Our On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure™ enables business advisors, accountants, bookkeepers and other advisors to have a “Up Close and Personal” relationship with the small business owner, providing key elements for the success of a small business:

• timely and up-to-date advice from anywhere at anytime,
• more efficient advisor function due to SaaS technology, less travel,
• easily expandable advisor network.

5. Solution Partners

Third parties provide external services to complement our services, such as parcel service, office supply services, printing services. These and other services are provided on a bulk buy arrangements by leading businesses in their respective sectors – to provide the most reliable and up-to date service possible – with the effect of enhancing the professional appearance of our clients.

6. ClimateByte™ Technology – For A Cleaner Future.

Our clients are among the biggest demographics concerned with climate change and carbon footprint neutrality. It is a fact that employing remote working and collaboration techniques drastically reduces the damaging business side affects on our environment. We enable our clients to be more eco-friendly and aware, by providing them with our green technology – an ongoing development commitment of WinWeb.

WinWeb welcomes any suggestion that will further enhance our On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure™ concept – especially the development of even more eco-friendly business processes – to serve our small business and business start-up client-base.

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Small Business Checklist: Home Office & Home Business

Aug 23, ’07 10:01 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Business Checklists, Entrepreneur, Freelancer, Green/Eco-Friendly, Home Business, Infrastructure, Lifestyle, Mobile Technology, MumEntrepreneur, Office - IT, Outsourcing, Personal Business, Relationships, Self-employed, Small Business / SOHO, Social Entrepreneur, Software as a Service, Sole-Trader, Start-Up, Virtual Assistants, Web Technology, WinWeb, Work/Life Balance, avoid growing pain, be eco-friendly, bootstrap, choose your office, grow your business, keep data safe, lower overheads, outsource effectively, plan cash-flow, plan your business, start-up in business, use online IT

As part of a bootstrapping exercise or a business start-up phase, working from home is a great way to work, so I thought of some points to consider when setting up your office, small business or personal business, like contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants at home:

  1. Cost – you will save a lot of money and be very eco-friendly when you decide not to rent an office, this saving can be used in other areas of your business, like marketing, better web-site or better IT.
  2. Family – I suspect that many of you work from home because of your family, it allows you to be around when your kids come home from school or look after relatives, while still earning a living.
  3. Commuting – again a very eco-friendly approach and saves money and time. This time can be spend on real business activities. It certainly will enhance your work/life balance and make your small business or start-up more cost efficient form day one.
  4. Freedom – this may especially appeal to you if you like to work at odd hours, it will suit your lifestyle. Dress as you like it, so you will be more comfortable.
  5. Healthy – if you work in an office and one of you gets ill, soon all the others are down too – not if you work from home.
  6. Teamwork – chances are you need to work with other people, use online technology to collaborate with your colleagues and other team workers – they too may work from home.
  7. Domestic Life – you’ll be around when the plumber finally turns up or other trades people. You can enjoy your local life more – by having a social network in your village rather than at work – this could be the return of the local community.
  8. Small Business Infrastructure – use online technology to keep your data and work safe at all times without that you have to do anything, build your own virtual Small Business Team to timeshare professionals like yourself. Outsource to make your business more professional and scalable.
  9. Meetings – even bigger businesses use coffee shops to meet – they often have WiFi – so can you. Make sure you plan them well, so you can be efficient with your time.
  10. Eco-Friendly – you will only heat your home, no other workplace needs to be heated or air-conditioned, your energy efficiency goes up, no travel to work – so you reduce your carbon footprint enormously just by working from home.

You will need some pretty good reasons to go to an office and work. Especially for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal business, you need to ask yourself if you can afford to miss out on all the above opportunities for your work and for your life?

I work from home over 90% of the time and only go to the office for meetings and I love every minute of this. I use social network communities like linkedIn to build my professional network, utilizing our online office, skype and other tools to communicate and work worldwide.

More and more of my friends work from home so we have nice “pub-lunches” locally, no traveling, less stress and a much better work/life balance – how is your work/life balance?

For more of my checklists see the Small Business Checklists category and as always please add to my list with your comments, tell us what works for you.

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Blog Action Day About Our Environment

Aug 20, ’07 2:22 PM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Blogging, Comments, Green/Eco-Friendly, News, be eco-friendly

I just registered my blog to join in on the Blog Action Day for our Environment – if you have a blog – please do the same.

WinWeb will publish it’s ClimateByte™ Technology Guidelines – in connection with our software release 3.4 – early next month and we are pleased to be associated with this

BLOG ACTION DAY FOR OUR ENVIRONMENT On October 15th, 2007

when everyone should post something about green/environmental issues on their blog.

Please join us and be part of the solution. One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

Hat-tip to the Chief Happiness Officer

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Virtual Small Business and Business Start-Up Teams

Aug 18, ’07 10:53 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Globalization 3.0, Green/Eco-Friendly, Infrastructure, Outsourcing, Small Business / SOHO, Virtual Assistants, Web Technology, WinWeb, WinWeb Live™, be eco-friendly, bootstrap, grow your business, lower overheads, outsource effectively, plan your business, use online IT

I have been writing about virtual assistants and virtual workers for quite some time, explaining the benefits of outsourcing to virtual assistants and workers for small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses.

But I never really wrote something about what it means to have a virtual small business team, which is part of WinWeb’s Small Business Infrastructure approach – so here it goes, a virtual small business team is:

  1. a collection of people working together in different locations, countries and time-zones
  2. a “network” of people working together using advanced online technology
  3. some teams my be project specific and/or limited in duration(time)

Not always do people only work virtually together, some times the meet – even if it is only socially. Under 1. many combinations are possible:

  • different time in different locations
  • same time in different locations
  • same time in same location
  • different time in the same location

This all really means one thing – anywhere at anytime! How virtual is your team or in other words how mobile and flexible is your small business. You should think about these issues in the planning phase of your business start-up.

Have you thought through all the possibilities for your small business outsourcing and bootstrapping or how much more green and eco-friendly your small business or start-up would be?

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Governments to help SOHO/SMB to Go Green

Aug 8, ’07 7:07 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Green/Eco-Friendly, be eco-friendly

Not only do small businesses, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer businesses, contribute greatly to the economic growth of the country, but also to the energy utilized in the country and hence it is important that the government take into account the needs of SMBs when formulating carbon footprint reduction policies.

The British Chambers of Commerce said that the role of small businesses should be considered when measures to reduce carbon footprints were being considered.

It also said that the Joint Committee Report on the Climate Change Bill lacked clarity and did not specify the legal enforceability of the climate change reduction targets.

“Small Businesses need a stable legislative environment and a coherent set of support measures, so that while larger companies are catered for, the needs of small business are not forgotten.” said BCC head of policy Natalie Evans.

Global warming is a real threat to the environment and the planet and it is important that all businesses, big and small make efforts for carbon reduction. It is vital that the government provides a clear framework for small businesses to work with.

It is a good idea for small or personal business, like contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants to invest in business infrastructure that would streamline business processes such as financial management and allow business owners to focus on core processes and find ways to reduce the energy consumption in the office.

A web office reduces tremendously the use of paper, shipping, packaging, heating, etc in the business and provides information at the click of the mouse.

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Virtual Assistants provide valuable support to your business.

May 8, ’06 9:25 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Development, Employment, Entrepreneur, Freelancer, Infrastructure, Lifestyle, Office - IT, Outsourcing, Small Business / SOHO, Start-Up, Virtual Assistants, Web Technology, Work/Life Balance, avoid growing pain, be eco-friendly, bootstrap, choose your office, do a reality check, outsource effectively, plan your business, recruit the right people, start-up in business

A Virtual Assistant can provide valuable assistance anywhere@anytime, in certain areas of your business activities where you can’t devote your time and energy.

There are numerous problems faced by small business in expanding their products or services, the hiring, cost and training of extra staff is one of them.

Having the presence of a Virtual Assistant is of advantage to your business as you get support and other services online. The major benefit of being associated with a Virtual Assistant is that you get professional and quality jobs, without having to employ a full time professional. To you it means savings on your HR expenditure, this helps to keep overheads low.

A Virtual Assistant can assist you in the area of his/her specialization, such as market research, credit control, public relations, marketing, payment follow-ups, designing, secretarial services, telephone answering and more.

This all comes back to my belief that small business does need a services infrastructure delivered over the internet, so that they can concentrate on developing the business, and do not have all their time taken up by admin tasks.

Update (04/06): Kathie Thomas introduces Virtual Assistants.

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