Top Five Money Saving Tips for Business
Top Five Money Saving Tips for Business
We are at the end of 2007 and the New Year is coming soon. The end of the year is always the best time to look back or look forward and examine how you can improve your enterprise and transform it to reach the next level. Here in TrexReviews.com, we always believe in the role of technology in giving an enterprise an unfair advantage against its competitors. Below we compiled a list of money saving tips for businesses (either small or big). Note that this is just a summary. Each item will have a detailed posting later on.
1. Replace your traditional phone with VOIP.
Traditional phone services are on the way out. Even the big players are slowly morphing into broadband internet and cell phone providers. Why? The land line phone business is dying. VOIP is marching on to replace it. It just makes sense. First, VOIP is way cheaper. It offers more features at a comparable voice quality and yes it is reliable. I’ve been using Vonage since 2005 and only had 2 major interruptions which lasted about an hour and those where in the first year. From then on, there’s been no service disruption. I believe that VOIP technology has already matured. Some traditional players are even offering it now.
Businesses should seriously look into VOIP. There’s no more reason not to switch. Examine how much money you are paying for your phone service right now and consider the offering of VOIP providers. Depending on your business, your savings will vary. Those who make a lot of long distance phone calls will save the most.
In addition, there are also offers for hosted PBX Service with toll free or local number included and unlimited calling plan. They give you a big business image at an affordable price (about $50/month).
2. Hire Virtual Assistants
Virtual Assistants are a must for a cost-saving entrepreneur. If you really want to save big bucks, stop hiring expensive temps or contractors. With the advent of new technologies like broadband internet and VOIP, you can outsource any of your non-core business function. The benefits are tremendous. No need to pay sick benefits and insurance plan. You pay only the hour worked on the task. You don’t need additional office space. Taking it to the extreme, in some industry, you can ditch your office space altogether and work from home and run your business using virtual assistant labor.
My suggestion is to look for a reliable partner and don’t just look at the hourly rate. Not all virtual assistants are created equal. Start outsourcing non-critical task so you get a feel of the capabilities of a particular virtual assistant. Slowly add bigger and bigger tasks.
3. Use Open Source and Free Softwares
We already ditch MS Office in the workplace. License is too expensive and its too bloated. Nobody really use 90% of its features so why pay a lot. Instead, we use OpenOffice from Sun. Its free and reliable. It can read and save to MS Word, Excel Spreadsheet, or MS Powerpoint file. I never missed any features from MS Office whatsoever. I don’t think I’m coming back.
Slowly, we’re trying to introduce Linux on our desktop in the workplace. Ubuntu is a Linux flavor that is quite good-looking and capable as well but I won’t recommend going all out on Linux just yet. There’s just a lot of application out there that runs only on Windows.
4. Make use of Web 2.0 applications
There’s a ton of Web 2.0 applications coming out left and right. Some of them useless while some are a real gem. For project management, we really like BaseCamp a lot. There’s a free although limited membership plan which you can use to try out their service. Check them out. They also came out recently with a CRM application, HighRise. I haven’t tried it myself but I’ll definitely will and would write a full review in a future posting along with a more detailed list of other Web 2.0 apps.
5. Advertise and Promote Online
Use the internet to promote your business. It’s definitely an inexpensive way to create buzz for your business. Advertise your product or job opening on sites like Craigslist, Yahoo Classified, Kijiji, just to name a few. Issue press releases on free press release websites. Blog about your company and your products. Create videos or commercials on YouTube and other video sites. Offer free products or a sample of your product and build a mailing list.
At the end of the day, quality should not be sacrificed just to save some coins. Be prudent and wise. Keep the above tips as a guideline.
There you go! That`s the top five money saving tips for your business. A more detailed posting of each item will be added on later blog. I’d definitely suggest that you subscribe to our RSS feed so you are always updated.
Those are nice tips. I’m actually thinking of getting VOIP for my home business. I surely will look around for a good provider next year. Do you have any advice? Thanks a bunch!
Hi Tricia! There are a couple who provides “Quality Service.” let me list the Top 3 for you; 1. Vonage; 2. Swiftvox; 3. CallCentric. Please check them out. There are also providers like VoipCheap that offers cheaper rates and lots of free calls depending on the recipient countries. Hope you find the right VoIP service provider and we’ll keep on writing on both the good and the bad ones soon