GoFaxer Blog

These days, setting up your own small business is as easy as baking a pie. You’ve got free email services like gmail. You’ve got inexpensive Internet fax services like GoFaxer. And you’ve hired a service to manage your incoming phone calls.

But what about a website? Many new businesses don’t really need a website for generating sales. But it’s become an industry standard to have a website. If you don’t have one it can look really unprofessional and small time.

But paying a web designer to create a website that has no other function than to suggest that you’re open for business is huge pain and in many cases unnecessary. A recent article at BusinessWeek.com by Larry Armstrong says:

“Today, setting up a Web site for your business can be virtually free. And you can do it yourself, using Web design tools and Web hosting services offered by Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), and others.”

He says that you can create the site using pre-made templates in about an hour. It also tells you how many visitors you get. It also gives you a domain name. The whole could cost you about $15 a year. that’s a much better price than hiring an expensive web designer.

I recently wrote about how technologies like email fax are helping women balance between family and their business responsibilities. I said:

“Even though many women want the opportunity to work, many also don’t want to forfeit their right to have a family . . . how do you work that baby into your meeting schedule? As long as businesses are tied to offices, with office machinery, it will always be hard for women to balance work and family.”

But we live in a modern age where business people are no longer tied to their offices. A recent article at Entrepreneur.com by Alexa Vaugn talks about women who started their own businesses while pregnant. For many, it turned out to be a good thing. Vaugn quotes Penny Domschot:

“Being pregnant and being a mom teaches you to be a master juggler that goes all day long–and that’s really the essence of being an entrepreneur. So it’s really the best training you can get in so many ways.”

The combination of advancing technology with progressing social attitudes are making it easier and easier for women to be successful in the business world. Indeed, it’s also helping men who want to be involved with their families as well, not having to spend long hours at the office, but remaining competitive in their career. We live in an exciting time for independent minded business people.

With a recession or economic slowdown here, it may be time to invest in new systems like email fax that will increase your profitability. It may even be necessary to invest seriously in major and expensive innovations to your infrastructure.

What? Did I read that right? Is he really suggesting that I spend a lot more money during a recession? I am. I’m not saying that you should spend more money on executive perks. I’m saying, it’s time to innovate. It’s time to spend money on big things that will improve your companies success and profitability dramatically.

The reason it’s a time to invest is it’s a perfect time to borrow. During recessions interest rates go down. The bank lender’s criteria may be stricter, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If the investment is solid, if your business’s basic health is good, you’ll be able to land some amazing financing during this period.

John Tozzi at BusinessWeek.com says:

“Banks are still looking to lend to companies that have the ability to repay, according to Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann, executive vice-president and head of Wells Fargo’s (WFC) small business segment. ‘In any economic environment, we’re going to want to look at a profitable business, an established business that has a history,’ she says.”

There is certainly a risk, trying to grow during a slowdown, but be smart about it and be bold. You could make it through with a smart return on your investment.

Now is the time to spend money on your business in ways that will either increase your sales or decrease your over-all expenses. Unfortunately too many businesses stop spending money during a slowdown. For example, if switching to email fax saves you money and makes you more efficient, it doesn’t matter whether we’re in an economic boom or a recession, you’re going to make more profit from the practice.

One area that you cannot slack on spending is marketing. This might go counterintuitive to your instincts. But you may have to spend more money if you want to make more money. I’m sounding like a traditional marketing manager who wants to spend indiscriminately to increase the size and scope of their programs. But I’m not advocating spending willy-nilly. I’m suggesting better, smarter marketing programs, and more of them. Because a good marketing strategy will make you more money. So why not do more of it?

Let’s say that your business puts 4% to the bottom line. If you spend that 4% on new marketing strategies, where much of the expenses are already fixed elements of being open for business, most of the increase in sales will go directly to your bottom line increasing it to 10%. You may be spending more than you were before, but you’ll be making more profit.

So start spending darn-it!

It used to be that running any business required that you purchase a very large and very expensive copy machine. You had to buy typewriters. You had to send memos. You had to get a land line with a telephone. You had to hire a receptionist.

But my friends, we live in a new age with new possibilities for young entrepreneurs. The opportunities for doing it differently are becoming endless. The simple fact is that you don’t really need an office to run your new small business. All you really need is a small laptop, a free email account through Google, and a good fax to email service. That’s all you need. You’re in business.

Of course, it also helps to have a product that others want to buy, but that’s besides the point.

In terms of actual office supplies, you don’t even really need to buy paper. All of your documents can be digital. Consequently, you won’t need any filing cabinets. You just need a nice documents box on your hard drive.

Pens? Not really. I haven’t written with a pen since 1998.

Post-it’s? Again, I would avoid them. They’re a crutch. Start keeping a good to-do list on a word document.

See tomorrow for some thoughts on how to set up your desktop on your computer.

It’s time to cut unnecessary expenses. It’s easy to get sloppy about this when your small business is growing dramatically, you’re making a profit, and the future seems brighter than summer. But with an economic slowdown eminent, it’s time to get Edward Scissorhands on those expenses. An article at BusinessWeek.com by Jeremy Quittner outlines one business’s cost cutting:

“In 2007, Polla Tray sent $30 bottles of champagne to customers as holiday gifts, rather than the $45 box of chocolates she gave the year before. She asked her sales staff to stay with friends and relatives when they traveled and to book flights during off-peak times. Those changes helped Alchimie slash its $20,000 annual travel budget by 15%.”

The key is to cut costs for things that aren’t vital to increasing your sales. You may need to have less company lunches. Maybe hold off on that conference room renovation. Do spend money on email fax, new marketing campaigns, and better systems that benefit your customers.

I like the example of Polla Tray choosing a different customer gift. Maybe the $30 bottle of champagne will actually have a greater perceived value than the $45 dollar box of chocolates. By getting serious about cutting costs, you may actually find better ways to do business.

So feel free to get out the scissors. And make this a strong time for your business.

Believe it or not, there are going to be some new small businesses starting during this year, a time of economic slowdown, that are going to do very well.

An article at BusinessWeek.com by Jeremy Quittner says:

“An economic downturn can be a great time to start a company. Competitors may go out of business, and the cost of labor may fall as more people are laid off and look for work. Commercial rents may decline, allowing you to score office space at a discount, and marketing and advertising expenses also tend to slide.”

Quite simply, during recessions, it becomes a buyers market. For new small businesses with a lot of new purchases, a bad economy can be a perfect house warming gift.

Businesses that survive their upstart during a slow economic time create a solid foundation to build their business on, a foundation which will be enormously profitable as the economy rebounds in their second and third year of doing business.

These companies aren’t going to waste their money on old technologies. They’ll be able to start clean with new and efficient technologies like email fax, better software, and other state of the art systems that many of their competitors haven’t gotten around to implementing.

At the end of the day, if your business idea is solid, if you’ve got great go-getters working for you, if you’ve got a good new business concept, you’ll be able to survive in good and bad times.

I like mobility. I like knowing that I can contact my fiancé at any time on her cell phone. I like knowing that I can bring my laptop whenever I travel, having a portable movie theater on the plane. I like the fact that I can send emails to friends at any time and in any place with an Internet connection, which nowadays is virtually everywhere.

For the small business owner, the possibilities of this mobility are very exciting. Do you really need to rent an office? Maybe eventually you will. But not right away. It’s feasible to have an entire staff working from home, working in the field, working online, and working at greater efficiency than ever before.

Your sales person in Scranton can fax you in California, without even having a fax machine. Services that offer fax to email represent this growing movement of business services online. You don’t even need software for many of these services. Just an Internet browser.

So if you’re willing to think outside of mainstream conventions, if you’re willing to invest a small amount of money in technologies that will take you a long way, now is the right time for you to become a mobile small business owner.

I recently read an interesting article at Businessweek.com by John Tozzi. He tackles the issues of start-ups that are growing and need to build their infrastructure. Many businesses have a hard time through these growing pains. Suddenly, the concern is no longer your marketing concepts or products. You’re now concerned with infrastructure. You’re concerned about building a team that can do their jobs without you having to look over their shoulder every five minutes. It’s about building a system of controls.

Tozzi says:

“For some entrepreneurs, understanding how their roles change in second-stage companies is the biggest challenge. ‘What you have to learn is how to effectively delegate, how to effectively motivate, how to instill trust [in employees] and to trust them,’ says Larry Kooiker, president of Holland (Mich.)-based Agritek.”

Of course, the big challenge is to make the necessary investments in infrastructure, without the organization becoming a beast that takes over everything. You still want the speed and agility that you enjoyed in your early days of business ownership.

I think the key is making smart decision about your expanding infrastructure. You want to choose services like fax to email, which make for a more efficient system, and don’t create a useless bureaucracy.

Recessions aren’t good. Let me just say that first off. No one wants them. They’re bad.

But a shrewd business owner can learn to use this period to his or her advantage. What types of businesses will do well during a slowdown? A recent post by Eve Tahmincioglu at msnbc.com points out a few.

There’s pawnshops, liquor stores, collections agencies. She also brought up “Speedemissions, a vehicle emissions testing and a safety inspection company with 38 emissions service centers in Georgia, Texas, Utah and Missouri.” When people keep their cars rather than buy new ones, more people are in need of emissions tests.

These businesses might seem like the vultures in a time of mass death. You might not be ready to get into a new business simply because of the short term advantages.  So let’s mention other businesses that should fare well during the downtime. Businesses that offer services with solid and immediate results, like fax to email services, will do very well. Whereas not as many businesses are going to want to redesign their conference rooms during this period.

So your marketing and sales efforts need focus on companies and customers that will be buying during the coming months. Perhaps consumers will be more deal driven than quality driven, meaning that you might need to give up some of your margin, but with more aggressive marketing tactics, you can still hit projections, creating great new customers that could bring in new revenue streams that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. So it’s not all bad news. Be positive, be smart, and you’ll make it through the coming storm.