Category Infrastructure

Entries 21 Total

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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Why Blogging for Small Business and Business Star-Ups?

Aug 20, ’07 1:00 PM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Blogging, Development, Infrastructure, Marketing/PR, Office - IT, Relationships, Small Business / SOHO, Start-Up, WinWeb, bootstrap, grow your business, market and sell, start-up in business, use online IT

As I mentioned before, traditional business marketing is changing. TV, radio and print media are in decline, because more and more of our time is spent online, the convergence of all these entertainment technologies has been going on for over a decade now and for the time it all seems to be IP – Internet Protocol centric.

What has that to do with my small business(?) – you may ask. It is actually crucial for your small business to understand this trent so you can act on it and actually save some money, by not wasting it on the wrong advertising medium.

Your small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal business, may have the greatest product or service, but if you can not make people find you and your products, your small business and business start-up is in trouble, before you even started. There are many parts to the successful small business puzzle and to prevent business failure – blogging could very well be one of them.

Every small business website should have a blog connected to it – needless to say that every small business without fail should have a website. It does not matter if you work globally or locally, a website and blog is a must, not just a nice to have.

A small business blog will help you with the following:

  • providing a platform for your small business to interact with your customers
  • getting real time feedback from your clients
  • provide additional information about your business, services and products
  • get your story told your way, offer some control of public opinion
  • create buzz about your business and products

It is easy to get a blog with your website hosting company or from WinWeb – you can be up and running in minutes. Hosting your own blog can be more technically demanding, but above all it will waste a lot of your valuable time – writing the articles (posts) for your blog is important – not running your server and blogging software.

Remember nobody is going to tell your story for you and nobody can tell your story better than you yourself.

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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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Small Office Administration 101

Aug 8, ’07 6:03 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Infrastructure, Outsourcing, Personal Business, Small Business / SOHO, Start-Up

Pamela Slim has a nice post “Start smart: 5 quick ways to set up business processes on the fly” – I can recommend you reading it:

“..You will find that in the start-up phase of business, many of the vendors, government agencies, potential customers, media contacts and partners want the same kind of information about you and your company. So instead of digging through file folders and your “sent” email, here are five suggestions for setting up quick and dirty business processes and organizing your information for easy access:….”

Being organized from day one will save you a lot of time and help you to stay focused on your business – not your office.

That is the reason I came up with the On-Demand Small Business Infrastructure – so you can stay focused on your business goals and not lose your time, money and energy on some administrative function. If you can not automate it – outsource it, to someone who makes a business out of it – like a Virtual Assistant.

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Virtual Business, what is that?

Aug 8, ’07 4:42 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Globalization 3.0, Infrastructure, Outsourcing, Personal Business, Small Business / SOHO, Virtual Assistants, outsource effectively

If you ever wondered what a virtual business for small or personal business, like contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants is, then here is an example: MrExcel.com – they are truly virtual and global:

  • Bill Jelen in Akron Ohio
  • Lora White manages the office in Uniontown, Ohio.
  • Linda Delonais is technical editor of our books.
  • Ivana Taylor is our virtual VP of marketing.
  • Wei Jiang is a full time programmer and project manager in Shiyan City. He is proficient in Visual Basic, Excel and Access.
  • Tracy Syrstad project manages all of the consulting projects at MrExcel. She is editor of all of the Holy Macro! Books and co-author of our newest book on Excel VBA.
  • Suat Ozgur is a full time Excel, Access, VB and php developer in Istanbul.
  • Anne Troy is author of a book on Microsoft Word that we are publishing this fall.
  • Barb Jelen works in Tucson and processes all of the orders placed through the MrExcel store.
  • Scott Pierson does all of our flash design from Philadelphia.
  • Mala Singh runs the MrExcel Graphics & Engineering Division in India.
  • Richard Kranesis in Chicago runs the MrExcel-branded training around the country, offering on-site Advanced Excel to companies.
  • We have a number of part time programmers who moonlight while still working at their day job. Lest their bosses find out, let’s thank Al, Angelita, Anhtuan, Audrey, Brian, Colo, Cory, Cort, David, Dawn, Duane, Harry, Ian, Ivan, James, Jake, Jay, Juan Pablo, Marcel, Marie, Mark, Mark, Nate, Nick, Richie, Robert, Russell, Scott, Skip, Suat, Tom, Tom, Tracy, Wendy, and Zack for their expertise in various Office products.
  • There are 3 dozen incredible volunteer MVP’s and 100′s of Excel Gurus who answer questions tirelessly at the message board. Thanks to all of them for making what I believe is the best Excel resource available anywhere.

This is an excellent example of what working online can mean, the more tailored your software/IT infrastructure is to working online, the less will it matter where people work and when. I wrote about Globeliszation 3.0 some time back this is an example of that too, small business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer businesses can benefit just as much from globelization as big firms. Think about the implications for your business, lower cost and less hassle recruiting is just the start.

Hat-tip to Anita Campbell, she has an interesting blog post on Google Hiring Local Contractors, too.

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Top 10 Most Significant Commerce Developments of the Last Decade

Aug 3, ’07 10:47 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Comments, How to ..., Infrastructure, Mobile Technology, Personal Business, Small Business / SOHO

The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and digital information industry, today announced its list of the top ten developments that have had the most significant impact on electronic commerce since the White House released the “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” ten years ago.

  1. Google (September 1998)
  2. 50% Broadband Penetration in the US (June 2004)
  3. eBay (September 1997)
  4. Amazon.com (May 1997)
  5. Google Ad Words (2000)
  6. Open Standard (HTML 4.0 released 1997)
  7. Wi-Fi (802.11 launched 1997)
  8. YouTube (2005)
  9. iTunes (2001)
  10. BlackBerry (1999)

It should be noted that the staff of the SIIA voted on this list – so it is a fairly limited demographic – but still interesting.

What I find interesting here is that these businesses all provide their products and services either online or mobile and I can’t think for my live of anything coming even close to this off-line. So they may just as well have left the word “electronic” out of the title.

I think the trend is very clear – online & on-demand – so all personal businesses, like contractors, freelancer, self-employed, virtual assistants and small business, like home-, micro-, lifestyle-, mobile-, SME-, SMB-, SOHO-businesses, need to look at this trend and then look at their business.

You start a business – any business – today you need to be online and on-demand.

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Big business less flexible than SMALL BIZ

Aug 1, ’07 8:21 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Boomer Business, Contractor, DIY Business, Entrepreneur, Freelancer, Generation-Y, Home Business, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Lifestyle, Personal Business, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, Self-employed, Small Business / SOHO, Virtual Assistants, WinWeb, start-up in business

While most of us want to achieve professional success a majority of working people are now unwilling to do so at the cost of their family and health. Employees are preferring to turn to businesses that offer them flexible working conditions that allow them an opportunity to find a balance between work and home.

This is a strong equalizer when it comes to compete for the employees with big business. An interesting research study by Mitel indicates that small businesses are more open to adopting flexible working conditions not only for the employees but also for the business owners. Small businesses are willing to utilize the internet and IP telephony to allow remote working.

” ….. 72% of small businesses were willing to allow their workers to work from home as compared to the 44% of bigger businesses and corporations. …”

Small businesses are making use of online business infrastructure and using it effectively to focus only on core activities. Having an online office is an excellent way for employees and employers to keep in touch with the office and also with clients and customers. Since the internet can be accessed at any time it really doesnít matter where one is and can log on and make crucial business decisions.

Working styles are changing globally and on-demand small business infrastructure is paving the way, not to forget it is more eco-friendly too.

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Evolution of Software as a Service (SaaS)

May 9, ’06 7:38 AM
Author Stefan Töpfer (Editor) Categories Accountants/CPAs, Accounting, Development, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Outsourcing, SME-Blog, Software as a Service, Start-Up, Virtual Assistants, Web Technology, WinWeb, WinWeb Live™, avoid growing pain

Dennis has a great new story this morning ( at 03:10 am ?) about “Sandhill Talks SaaS 2.0″. He also comments on my feelings toward SaaS. And he is quite right to say:

I’m pretty sure Stefan Topfer, CEO at Winweb would agree. His company’s offering sees accounting as a utility that underpins the business but which of itself is of little intrinsic value other than a necessary means of achieving compliance. Instead, he’s creating an infrastructure to support early stage business.

I am looking at this from a different perspective. All I care about is “client mortality”, the advantages of the SaaS model are enormous, but can be improved upon.

How do most small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses start? You have an idea, then what? As if it is not enough to deal with your idea you need to worry about all kinds of admin functions to run any kind of business. That is were WinWeb comes in, we are trying to provide:

  • A on-demand, online IT infrastructure (SaaS), that will enable to set you up to run your small business with in minutes, at a very low cost, so you can “try” your business idea for a month, a year, whatever. You do not need a bank loan or quit your job (in some cases, you will have to) to find out if your idea is worth it. If it is not, then you go back to the drawing board and try again later. No problem since you have no contract with us that logs you in with us.
  • But most importantly of all, we use our SaaS model to have you not only work with colleagues anywhere @ anytime in real time, but also with your accountant. Now here is the thing, most of us when we started our small business did not know the first thing about accounting, financial planning, and when and when NOT (that’ll be me then) to buy that BMW 530i. Your accountant, if it’s a good one, will not only tell you but explain it to you, so you grow from someone with an idea to a “business” someone with an idea.
  • The same is true for other “Virtual Assistants“: Call answering, bookkeeping, typing, credit control, etc. There are so many dedicated professional people out there, mainly working from home. There is no way you could hope, as a small business, to employ even one of these skill sets full-time, unless they are important to the core business. With our SaaS model you can time-share these specialists at a very low hourly rate.

The combination of the SaaS model with our Live! services provides a low cost, well looked after (accountant), and very versatile business infrastructure that does lower new business mortality rates and lowers barrier for business start-up.

BTW, I read a great post the “Entrepreneurship Gap” yesterday. Here you can find some ideas about starting up in business that I like.

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Not all accountants are created equal (how do you choose an accountant)

May 8, ’06 9:54 AM
Author jason holden Categories Accountants/CPAs, Accounting, Development, Entrepreneur, Finance, Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Outsourcing, Red-Tape, Software as a Service, Start-Up, Virtual Assistants, Web Technology, avoid growing pain, bootstrap, deal with taxes, do a reality check, do bookkeeping., find funding, grow your business, handle problems, lower overheads, outsource effectively, plan cash-flow, plan your business, start-up in business, use online IT

My first contribution to this blog has resulted from a recent experience had by a new client of my practice with someone who also used the title ‘accountant’.

Firstly, you need to understand in the UK there is no requirement to have any formal training or qualifications before calling yourself an accountant. This does not for one minute mean that someone without formal qualifications is going to be bad, not for one minute, so how do you chose your accountant?

As with anything, I would always say choose an accountant on the recommendations of a friend/colleague. If you know someone who uses an accountant, and they are happy with them, then this is a good starting point. Next, does the accountant have relevant experience in the industry you are in, or an allied industry, after all, it’s going to make life a lot easier if he actually knows a bit about the industry you’re in when offering advice.

But what if you don’t know anyone who can make a recommendation, what next? This is where I would definitely look for an accountant who belongs to a professional body, and holds a current and up to date practicing certificate, at least this way I would know this ‘stranger’ has gone through a certain standard of training and will have had to achieve a minimum level of experience before being admitted to membership.

The decisions don’t stop there though, unlike other countries where there is either one or a very small number of professional accounting bodies, the UK has many, as shown at the end of this post.

In summary, if you know someone who uses an accountant they are happy with meet them first, next find an accountant who understands your industry and finally if you have to make a selection on your own, then meet and interview at least three accountants before making your choice, remembering their membership of a professional body affords you some protection. Good luck!

Here is the list of accounting bodies:

The Association of Certified Accountants (ACCA)
The Association of International Accountants (AIA)
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Englandand Wales (ICAEW)
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS)
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (ICAI)
Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA)

Professional bodies whose members cannot act as company auditors:

Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA)
Certified Public Accountants (Ireland) (CPA)
Institute of Financial Accountants (IFA)
Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT)

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