Small Business Home Office on a Budget

If you have a small business home office, chances are you’re working within a tight budget. Working from home is a great idea, but it also means that you are sharing your living space with your work and that can get a little uncomfortable at times. To ensure the best productivity, there are a few things you should consider when setting up your home office.

Location

First of all, think about where you actually have space. If you live in a one bedroom apartment, you’re not going to have a lot of options. Unless you are lucky enough to have a spare bedroom, chances are you’ll be doubling up on space usage.

Look at some unusual areas. For example, under the stairs or a walk-in closet could be converted into a small business home office. No closets? Then you will just have to get creative.

Avoid using your bedroom as an office if you can help it. This is for two reasons, first because it is very difficult to work when you are tired and the bed is just a few steps away and second, you may find that you have problems sleeping when you are in the same room as your work. The temptation to continue working can be pretty strong at times!

Ambiance

Whether you are in a closet or squashed between the couch and the television, your surroundings are important. Invest in a desk or table that will give you space to settle in. You will also want something that looks decent. If you have an older desk, use a tablecloth or some paint to make it over.

A bulletin board hanging in on the wall above the desk is a great way to give yourself more space for notes, while also making your work space a little more professional.

Space

Sure, you have room for your desk, but what about filing or storing work related information? Opt for a desk with drawers, use simple drawer dividers to maximize use of the space and consider investing in more shelves to put at the back of the desk. You can never have enough space and it is well worth it to invest a bit and make sure you have enough room for everything work related so you can stay organized and not get frustrated.

A small business home office needs to be organized because it is often out where others will see it when they come to visit. If you are lucky enough to have your own space for your business, this is great, but otherwise, you’ll need to look at ways to make your home office suit your needs.

Using a Small Bank to Obtain a Business Line of Credit

In today’s lending world, many people have flocked to smaller banks or community based credit unions when seeking to obtain a business LOC or business line of credit. This is because, while still very scientific and numbers driven, the people that are ultimately making credit decisions are people located within your area. Unlike large money center banks that have thousands of branches, the bankers in your community can see your success in person. Of course, this does not delineate from the fact that you must still have the appropriate collateral and credit in place in order to obtain a business line of credit. However, small banks tend to be more lenient in their credit decisions when determining whether or not to extend a business a line of credit.

Small banks, despite the news of major bank failures and bailouts over the past three years, have thrived in this environment. While many have dealt with the same issues as large sized banks, small banks typically did not make complicated investments that included credit default swaps, interest rate swaps, and use of other exotic financial instruments. As such, their capital levels and profitability did not take nearly the same hit as their major money center bank counterparts.

As such, if you have been turned down by a traditional large bank for a business line of credit then it may be in your best interest to give your small local bank a shot. Additionally, if this is the route that you want to take then you may want to offer to transfer all of your business banking operations to that bank. This will assist you in ensuring your bank that you want to have an ongoing and fruitful relationship with them over an extended period of time. Many small banks are very keen to have your business not only in a lending capacity, but also in regards to checking accounts, savings accounts, certificates of deposit, and money market funds. The more business you can offer your bank – the more credit they will be willing to extend to you over the long run.

Scalability: Why Small Businesses Outsource

Mature industries like banking, pharmaceuticals and insurance have been outsourcing for decades – even before the term became popular. These verticals have standardized processes in their industries which enable them to easily scale – based on the economy and market conditions.

Because outsourcing has become available to small business owners and online professionals, you can now expect the same level of scalability, efficiency and cost savings that exists in other well-managed businesses that leverage outsourcing.

According to a report titled “Global Sourcing Trends in 2009” by U.S.-based law firm Morrison and Foerster:  Most outsourcing transactions intend to produce immediate improvements to the bottom line for businesses. While this is a common reason to outsource, with fluctuating economic times like we have been experiencing lately, the flexibility to scale up or scale down (based on the business’s needs) has been the determining factor to outsource.

Smart executives are using outsourcing to build flexibility and scalability into their businesses—and to gain access to a global pool of skills at competitive cost.

The recent economic downturn led many companies, especially those who don’t have existing outsourcing contracts, to consider outsourcing. But companies who already have outsourcing agreements are re-evaluating their outsourcing decisions to find providers that offer more business continuity and integration.

In an environment where Fortune 500 companies have disappeared overnight, a successfully executed outsourcing partnership could make the difference in a company’s ability to ride out these challenging times. The flexibility to bring on needed help and expertise in times of growth – without committing to a project contract or adding people to the payroll, has been an invaluable solution to the small business owner and online professional. In addition to providing scalability, this also allows the owner to focus on core competencies of the business.

Outsourcing provides businesses with instant scalability and service flexibility, as well as reducing overhead costs.  One of the major advantages of outsourcing is that companies can now get the best from new developments without the expense.

In terms of new technologies, new processes and new ways of doing things, you don’t have to invest to do that in-house.  Outsourcing is also particularly beneficial for new businesses, or those looking to expand their operation. This includes those who do not necessarily know what hardware or software they will need.

Outsourcing providers with more experience should be able to advise companies about where to spend their money, so that they do not waste time and resources.

Any hesitation to outsource may be affecting your company’s chances to effectively scale for growth in this highly competitive business environment. As a small business owner or online professional, carefully consider your outsourcing partner when looking to expand your business and make it globally competitive.  When considering a company for outsourcing, make certain that they are equipped to handle the ebb and flow needs of your business when scaling up, and when scaling down!

Starting Your Own Small Business in 2010? Do It In Style With a New York Virtual Office!

So, 2010 is going to be a big year for you! You’ve decided it’s time to step up and into your own small home based business – but you want to make sure you get it right so you don’t suffer financially, right? It’s common knowledge that many small business start-ups fail quite quickly, and home based businesses are no exception. There are many reasons why home based businesses fail. Here are just two things that can contribute to the failure of a home based business:

Inability to attract clients – particularly corporate ones – due to a perception of the business as a small home based operation; Poor customer service including a failure to respond to prospective clients in a timely and professional manner, leading to a loss of business;

If you’ve done your market research and you’re confident you have sufficient funds to survive the early growth stages of your business you’re well on the way to success. The next step is to ensure that your business appears professional and that you’re able to attract good clients and communicate with them in a professional manner. A New York virtual office can help you with that – and from as little as a month!

With a New York virtual office from VH International Business Solutions you can:

Have a physical New York office address for your business. The address can be used on your business cards and clients can send mail to you at the address. Any walk in clients will be able to leave a message for you at our staffed reception area. Have a New York telephone number. Calls to your New York virtual office number can be forwarded to you or to a message bank. Alternatively, you can arrange to have a live operator answer all your calls during business hours and take messages personally. Arrange meetings or presentations at your New York location – we have meeting rooms and offices available for short term hire at inexpensive rates. That means that when you need to be “at the office” physically, you can be.

You might be years away from being able to afford office rental in New York – and perhaps you don’t aspire to that at all – but a New York virtual office from VH International Business Solutions can give you many of the benefits of a great office address without the expense, or the need to travel to the office!

Starting Your Own Small Business? Do It In Style With A Nyc Virtual Office!

It’s going to be a big year for you! You’ve decided it’s time to step up and into your own small home based business – but you want to make sure you get it right so you don’t suffer financially, right? It’s common knowledge that many small business start-ups fail quite quickly, and home based businesses are no exception. There are many reasons why home based businesses fail. Here are just two things that can contribute to the failure of a home based business:

Inability to attract clients – particularly corporate ones – due to a perception of the business as a small home based operation;
Poor customer service including a failure to respond to prospective clients in a timely and professional manner, leading to a loss of business;

If you’ve done your market research and you’re confident you have sufficient funds to survive the early growth stages of your business you’re well on the way to success. The next step is to ensure that your business appears professional and that you’re able to attract good clients and communicate with them in a professional manner. A NYC virtual office, from VH International Business Solutions, can help you with that – and from as little as a month!

With a NYC virtual office you can:

Have a physical NYC office address for your business. The address can be used on your business cards and clients can send mail to you at the address. Any walk in clients will be able to leave a message for you at our staffed reception area.
Have a New York telephone number. Calls to your NYC virtual office number can be forwarded to you or to a message bank. Alternatively, you can arrange to have a live operator answer all your calls during business hours and take messages personally.
Arrange meetings or presentations at your New York location – we have meeting rooms and offices available for short term hire at inexpensive rates. That means that when you need to be “at the office” physically, you can be.

You might be years away from being able to afford office rental in New York – and perhaps you don’t aspire to that at all – but a NYC virtual office, from VH International Business Solutions, can give you many of the benefits of a great office address without the expense, or the need to travel to the office!

Contact VH International Solutions today, and start running your NYC Virtual Office tomorrow.

Starting A Small Business? Do It In Style With A New York Virtual Office!

It’s going to be a big year for you! You’ve decided it’s time to step up and into your own small home based business – but you want to make sure you get it right so you don’t suffer financially, right? It’s common knowledge that many small business start-ups fail quite quickly, and home based businesses are no exception. There are many reasons why home based businesses fail. Here are just two things that can contribute to the failure of a home based business:

Inability to attract clients – particularly corporate ones – due to a perception of the business as a small home based operation;
Poor customer service including a failure to respond to prospective clients in a timely and professional manner, leading to a loss of business;

If you’ve done your market research and you’re confident you have sufficient funds to survive the early growth stages of your business you’re well on the way to success. The next step is to ensure that your business appears professional and that you’re able to attract good clients and communicate with them in a professional manner. A New York virtual office can help you with that – and from as little as a month!

With a New York virtual office from VH International Business Solutions you can:

Have a physical New York office address for your business. The address can be used on your business cards and clients can send mail to you at the address. Any walk in clients will be able to leave a message for you at our staffed reception area.
Have a New York telephone number. Calls to your New York virtual office number can be forwarded to you or to a message bank. Alternatively, you can arrange to have a live operator answer all your calls during business hours and take messages personally.
Arrange meetings or presentations at your New York location – we have meeting rooms and offices available for short term hire at inexpensive rates. That means that when you need to be “at the office” physically, you can be.

You might be years away from being able to afford office rental in New York – and perhaps you don’t aspire to that at all – but a New York virtual office from VH International Business Solutions can give you many of the benefits of a great office address without the expense, or the need to travel to the office!

Advertising and Small Business: Should You?

I worked in an advertising agency for 5 years and then in the advertising sales department at a radio and television station for another 4 years, and believe me, every client wanted to be on the front cover, above the fold, on during the Super Bowl, or air during rush-hour traffic.

For the bigger multi-national companies advertising was a no-brainer in many cases – it’s what they needed to do to keep up awareness of their brand and keep top-of-mind.

The answer for small business owners was a bit different. Some advertising opportunities were a good fit and made sense but many times, spending money on traditional advertising just doesn’t make sense. This is especially true if you provide your products and services to a large geographic area – not just a local location.

In reality, there are several things inherent in advertising that just do not make business and money sense for small businesses and service professionals.

1. Advertising is usually a mass medium

This means that advertising is usually aimed at everyone – it’s hard to just “talk” to a niche market with advertising. Because of the large focus of TV, radio, newspaper and magazines, small business owners can spend a lot of wasted money – advertising to people who aren’t in their niche target group.

2. Advertising is expensive

Because of the larger audience available via traditional advertising (think of all the people who watch TV and listen to the radio!), the costs associated are usually quite high. To produce, create and run a television commercial can run you in the 6 – 7 figures; ads in national magazines can costs in the tens of thousands and even radio commercials can be several thousand dollars.

3. Advertising doesn’t allow for frequent exposure

Due to the high cost of advertising and the limited space and time to purchase, it’s very expensive to advertise enough times to get noticed. We had a saying in the advertising world that you needed to have a 3+ frequency – this meant a person needed to see/hear your advertisement at least 3 times before they even barely noticed it.

In this media-saturated world we live in, where we’re bombarded with thousands and thousands of messages each day, advertising doesn’t get our attention like it did in the old days. If you can only afford to run one magazine ad or a handful of radio commercials, you’re really just throwing your money away.

4. Advertising doesn’t have the ability for strong follow-up and call-to-action

Getting someone’s attention is only the first step – you then need them to take a specific action, such as visit a website, pick up the phone, visit a location, and so on. Because many times small business owners can only afford a small ad, there isn’t the space or size to outline a clear call-to-action and next steps. Many prospects can be left not knowing what they should do next if they’re interested.

As well, follow-up is key to converting prospects into customers and the expense and lead time of advertising doesn’t allow for much follow-up at all. Again, prospective clients are lost due to advertising’s inability to provide follow-up.

Advertising has its place and can work for small businesses, but there are many more cost-effective and high-impact marketing strategies that you can employ to get a return on investment much quicker, effectively and consistently.

2 Things To Keep In Mind When Starting A Small Business

One benefit the Internet offers you when starting a small business is your ability to customize it the way you want. You can also keep in the back of your mind that any mistakes that you make can quickly be overcome online.

One of the best small businesses to start is in affiliate marketing business. You can run this on the Internet and you can be set up to go with your own small business very quickly.

Let’s take a look at the two things you should keep in mind when starting a small business on the Internet as an affiliate marketer.

1. First of all you need to be aware of the various programs and products that are available to you. It really is to your benefit to spend some time doing some research on the market that you want to be in before you choose the products themselves.

You are looking for a market that has a lot of interest in it and then find a program that has a number of quality products to sell in that market. Of course you’re going to be looking at the commission structure to determine how much money you make as well.

2. From the very beginning put the emphasis in your small business on building an email list of names and email addresses. If you did nothing other than build a list and mail offers to it you can make an excellent income with the small business online.

There are several ways to go about doing this and you certainly want to give away free things in exchange for their contact information. Ebooks and reports work extremely well for this.

You’re much better off as an affiliate marketer to get the names of your prospects before you pass them through to your affiliate website. For this reason, you’ll want to use landing pages as well as have sign-up forms on your own personal website or blog.

The other thing to keep in mind when you’re building your email list of names is to develop that list into people who know you and respect you. This takes away the coldness of the Internet because it’s so easy to be nothing more than a stranger when you are working through email marketing.

These are two things to keep in mind when starting a small business online. Affiliate marketing is the best way to make money and building an email list is an excellent way to do affiliate marketing.

How To Get Hired – Small Business Perspective

There’s plenty of advice out there for job candidates who are submitting resumes to big corporations, recruiters, or even mid-sized companies that have HR departments handling the whole hiring process. I work for a small, healthy and growing business which currently employs about 12 people. Most of these employees are specialists, a couple are management, and we have two support staff members. We have a multi-functioning office manager (myself) who handles IT support, HR and hiring initiatives, as well as administrative, marketing and public relations support. It’s a pretty typical small business set up.

I read through information published to help job seekers sometimes and am alarmed at how many tips and techniques do not translate from being effective for big businesses to working when contacting a small business. For instance, I read an article on Yahoo yesterday about 12 Tips to Get Your Resume Noticed. I was totally on board with Ms. Johnson’s advice until I got to tip #9. And #10. And #11 and 12 as well. I sat there imagining what would happen to my productivity level if all of the sudden even a percentage of the 75+ candidates who email resumes to me every day for our current open position decided to – gasp – call me!

So, I put together a list of things to do, and not to do, when applying for a job at a small company:

Remember that the person reading resumes in a small company probably wasn’t hired for that sole purpose. He or she has plenty of other job responsibilities that are waiting until all these resumes are reviewed. Be clear, concise and on-point. Include any and all information that was asked for in the job ad. Stand out by preparing a short, detailed cover note about why, exactly, you are the perfect candidate for the position advertised. Don’t call. Please, please, please don’t call. I guarantee that it will only serve to annoy the already overworked employee who has spent the morning reviewing resumes and is trying desperately to catch up with his or her normal workload. Be extremely diligent in reviewing your resume for errors and be sure that it is written in a formal tone. If you give a reviewer any reason to toss your resume into the “Do Not Contact” file, that’s a great excuse to move on to the next applicant in that growing stack of resumes left to review. Don’t follow up unless you have been contacted. While larger companies may have the bandwidth and/or technical capabilities to respond to each and every applicant, small companies cannot always do so. If you haven’t heard back, send your resume again, but don’t call or send emails asking for an update. If you didn’t read anything about the job or don’t really have any relevant experience but are just applying to everything you find on Craigslist.com “just in case”, don’t expect a response. Big companies and recruiters have tools to identify candidates with the right background and skill sets without reading each resume that comes in. Small businesses do not, and I’m sure the person tasked with reading your resume does not appreciate the waste of time.

Really, the number one thing to remember when applying for a job at a small company is to be respectful of the hiring manager’s time. Show that you are by providing exactly what’s asked for and by making it easy for the hiring manager to quickly see how your specific skills and experience translate into the perfect candidate for the job you’re applying for.

How Can Small Businesses squeeze More Sales Out of a Lead Generation Funnel?

Solo entrepreneurs, home based businesses and small businesses are all faced with the uncertainty of these tough economic times. Despite all the doom and gloom, one thing that is for sure is that there will be survivors. But … “Who will they be?” “What are they going to do to make it happen?” Luck will not play the biggest part of getting through these times. It is probably safe to say that the ones who do get through this and actually grow will have taken very deliberate actions to make it so. What then will these businesses do?

The obvious first step is to streamline the costs of doing business without compromising quality to customers. This means that they will take the time to find vendors who are offering better prices, look for ways to streamline staffing costs (telecommuting, virtual assistants, cutting back hours), becoming more energy efficient (traveling less, lowering heating and cooling costs), find more affordable health insurance options and so forth. Once they have streamlined, smart businesses will continue to look for ways to get more for less while trying to increase the value that they provide to their customers.

The first place to get more for less is by finding more effective marketing strategies. It is crucial to note that the only type of marketing that should be cut is ineffective marketing. Existing marketing programs need to be evaluated for their effectiveness. Low ROI marketing strategies should be abandoned and replaced with those that have a high ROI. Effective marketing is essential for getting in front of potential customers as well as staying in front of existing ones. This is not the time to ignore your existing customer base. After all, it takes six times as much money to acquire a new lead as it does to market to an existing one. Smart businesses recognize that effective marketing is their lifeline to the future.

What is the best place to start? Systems that organize and automate essential processes for small business will create a high ROI. The best place to get started is by using a customer relationship management program (CRM).

CRM is much more than a contact management system although this is one of the functions that these programs can perform (sometimes they will coordinate with an existing one such as Outlook). CRM is the master organizer for so many different processes that a small business has. It provides a means to track and segment all customer information and then track what has been done and what needs to be done. It allows the various departments such as marketing, sales and customer service to be aware of the needs of any given prospect or customer and what needs to be done next.

What would this mean to a business that has a presence on line? It means that a prospect is able to fill out a contact form 24 hours a day/7 days a week. The prospect that fills out this form will now be tagged as a prospect in the CRM system. Depending upon the information that was checked on the form (e.g. newsletter request, product information desired etc.) the prospect will have additional tags that indicate the interests of these prospects. Depending on the type of form that was filled, the database may also now contain demographics such as age, location, occupation and so forth. All of these would be tags that help segment the list. The segmented lists will be connected to appropriate email follow up sequences that automatically send out information, education and marketing materials over a period of weeks, months or year.

This one capacity of CRM has enormous value. Consider that 80% of small businesses fail to follow up with prospects beyond three attempts and that it typically takes seven or more “touches” for a prospect to become a customer. The tragic end result for businesses that fail to follow up is that they are warming up their leads for their competition.

What else can a CRM system do? Automatically sending welcome messages, customer satisfaction surveys and promotional materials will create future sales opportunities.

It can also organize affiliate programs, billing and so much more.

A good CRM will be able to use multiple channels to communicate including: emails and newsletters, fax broadcasts, voice blasts, and direct mail post cards. An automated system is highly cost effective and efficient at generating new and repeat sales. CRM is also a time and energy saver and ultimately the best way to squeeze more sales out of any lead generation funnel.