Technology can be a lifesaver for a small business owner, but only if you know how to use today’s top tools to spark efficiency. Communication is one area that is fast becoming critical to the success of small businesses. These suggestions are good reminders on how communication technology can shave unnecessary expenses while streamlining employee workflow:

1. Improve employee satisfaction.

Aging phone systems and slow networks can frustrate your employees and annoy your customers. In some cases, an employee might become burned out and decide to move on. To help ensure that employees are productive and satisfied, your business needs a secure, reliable, and fast network.

2. Reduce unproductive travel time.

All too often, time spent on the road is time lost. A networked phone solution that offers video calls and Web conferencing can help reduce the time and expense of traveling to offsite meetings and training sessions. Instead of spending time traveling, you can use the time to get work done with technology.

3. Make it easy to work together.

Smooth collaboration between employees, partners, suppliers, and customers is a sure-fire way to boost efficiency while also reducing costs. An intelligent network lets your business take advantage of interactive calendaring, videoconferencing, unified communications, and other technologies for easy collaboration. In fact, through May 31, small business owners can take advantage of a free trial of the Verizon Collaboration Center, which gives easy access to all of these features. Companies can register for the free trial at: http://business.verizon.net/betterway/challenge.php

4. Streamline customer communications.

Delivering fast, knowledgeable service is the best way to keep customers satisfied. Linking your network phone system to a customer relationship management (CRM) solution is a great way to enhance customer communications. When a customer calls, a pop-up window with their records appears on an employee’s IP phone screen, computer screen, or both.

5. Develop a long-term technology plan.

The process of replacing obsolete hardware can interrupt your employees and bring the office to a standstill. You can minimize such disruptions by carefully determining short- and long-term business objectives and working with your network vendor or IT professional to deploy technology that matches them.

Article Contributed by Jim DeLapa

A huge customer for a new small business can be both a blessing and a curse.  The positive side is more obvious—the business establishes an early recurring source of revenue. Since revenue is the lifeblood of any business, what could be wrong with that?  Nothing, if you don’t stop there.

Any new small business owner will tell you that there is never enough time to do everything he or she knows they need to do to grow their business.  In addition to fulfilling customer orders, there are personnel issues, the website and other marketing activities, and an unbelievable number of administrative tasks that must be done even if they don’t help to grow the business.

It seems perfectly logical to focus on just that one big customer when keeping up with that customer’s orders is taking all of your time.  After all, you have too much work to do now.  Why go out and look for new customers?   Wouldn’t it be better to just take care of the business you have?  The answer is ‘absolutely not.’ Don’t fall into that trap.

Of course you want to take care of your big customer.  But you cannot stop there even for a short time.  Doing so becomes a habit and a way of life for too many small business owners.  Remember, if you only have one customer, no matter how big, you don’t have a business, you have a job. Eventually it will become clear that you have no leverage and no control even over the fate of your own company.

To drive this point home, imagine that your new business gets off to a great start.  You land that big customer that everyone would want and you take care of them like no other.  Your business grows, you’re hiring people, taking on more office space, profits are strong and you’re living the American dream.  Then, after three years, they still account for 80% of your business and suddenly something changes. For any of a hundred reasons, you’re notified that your number one customer will be your customer no more.

Within 90 days, you lay off more than half your staff, take a pay cut and are negotiating with an unsympathetic landlord to take back some of the office space.  As you sit in your office alone at night with your head in your hands, you say to yourself, ‘If only we had gone after other customers when we had the chance.’   This story and this pattern are far too common among small business owners.  It leaves previously successful small business leaders feeling betrayed, humiliated and defeated.

Regardless of your success with any given customer, it is essential that you build a broad base of customers as if your business depends on it—because it does.   To ensure that your team gets behind this goal include “number of new customers” as a metric in your incentive compensation or bonus plans.  As the business owner, delegate less important tasks and stay involved in both the ‘big’ customer account and the effort to bring in new customers.

Building a small business on a diversified base of customers is a winning long term strategy.  In doing so, you’ll even out the ups and downs in revenue and profitability.  This will serve you well if you ever seek a small business loan or line of credit.  You’ll be creating a business with a higher valuation and one that delivers stability and peace of mind to its employees and owners.  Make sure your small business plan includes a commitment to building a broad base of customers.

About the Author:

Jim DeLapa is the founder of GreatBusinessPlans.com, a leading provider of small business plan assistance for current and future small business owners.  DeLapa has launched and invested in numerous successful startups and played an active role in nurturing two of those from inception through being acquired by publicly traded firms.

Terry Cartwright qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant and Chartered Company Secretary in 1971. A successful business career followed as Head of Finance for major companies in the UK and several consultancy appointments. In 2006 he created DIY Accounting producing Accounting Software for self employed and small companies that use simple accounts spreadsheets to automate tax returns.

Terry Cartwright qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant and Chartered Company Secretary in 1971. A successful business career followed as Head of Finance for major companies in the UK and several consultancy appointments. In 2006 he created DIY Accounting producing Accounting Software for self employed and small companies that use simple accounts spreadsheets to automate tax returns.

The US Tax Code can be pretty rough on the self employed. It often seems to be written to favor big corporations over small and solo businesses. The rules are often complex and confusing for the average self employed individual to grasp, even with the help of an accountant. And that first paycheck can be a shock when you realize how much of it is eaten up by self employment taxes!

Even when tax breaks are available, figuring out if you qualify and then having all the right paperwork in place may make those deductions seem like they aren’t worth the hassle! For instance, if you have a home business, i.e. you work out of your house, you may be able to deduct for a ” home office” — but the requirements are strict, and can be a trigger for an unwelcome audit. Mileage reimbursement is a little more straightforward, until you realize you have to write down every trip, its’ length, who you met with and what you talked about! And not many new business owners even remember to keep track of startup expenses, much less understand how depreciation works, without the help of a good accountant.

There is one tax provision, however, that is clearly worth the trouble: a Section 105 Medical Reimbursement Plan. This can save you, quite literally, thousands of dollars a year. You must be married and able to legitimately employ your spouse at least part-time in your business in order to qualify. If you are and you can, read on — your heartburn over outrageous health insurance premiums and skyrocketing medical expenses may be about to go away!

Here’s the bottom line: with the requirements met and the proper paperwork in place, you can:

• Deduct 100% of your family health insurance premiums
• Deduct 100% uninsured family medical and dental expenses
  
• Save a huge chunk in federal, state, and self employment taxes!
  

How do you qualify? You must have a properly documented employment agreement with your spouse, and the work performed and salary must be reasonable. Complete records of the premiums and expenses and their reimbursement are required. Ugh, more paperwork…but help is on the way!

I’ve been very impressed with the BizPlan/AgriPlan Section 105 Medical Reimbursement Plan, offered by TASC (Total Administrative Services Corporation). Recommended by a colleague (who saves several thousand dollars every year with this plan), I’ve found TASC to be a very professional company that takes its obligations to its self employed customers very seriously, including offering a tax audit guarantee. And the annual cost is very reasonable, starting at under $200.

Don’t wait — you can only deduct expenses that occur in or after the month you apply for the plan. Consult your accountant, and check out BizPlan today, for maximum tax savings this year!

If you’re like many entrepreneurs, the thought of marketing makes you slightly sick to your stomach. And it’s more then a simple like or dislike of marketing, it’s the idea of trying to fit it into your to-do list. You already have a million things going on, how can you possibly fitmarketing in?

So, instead, you end up not doing anything…until you run out of work that is. Then you desperately race around, trying to cram as much marketing as possible into as short amount of time as possible to try and ramp up your business.

Business picks up, you stop marketing again.

As I’m sure you already know, this isn’t a great way to grow a business on any level. But what do you do? You’re already overwhelmed with everything you have to do in your business, not to mention everything you have to do in your life, so how can you possibly fit marketing into that?

Never fear, that’s what the below 3 tips are designed to do, get you out of marketing overwhelm and into marketing superstar.

1. Make marketing a priority.
Okay, don’t stop reading yet. This one might be tough to swallow but it has to be said. Marketing your business HAS to be a priority. If it’s not, then you will doom yourself to a “feast or famine” business model (where you oscillate between too many and too few clients, and because you’re in a constant roller coaster, you can never get enough traction to actually start growing your business).

But, I can hear you say, my priority needs to be on getting the work done. That’s what my clients are paying me for, and because they’re paying, then they have to be my top priority.

My response to that is well, not exactly. You’re right, you need to get the work done, and do a good job, or you’re going to run out of income pretty quickly. But, if you trade doing the client work over marketing, then you’re never going to get ahead.
(And, to be honest, it’s not fair to your clients either to have you constantly stressed about your business because you don’t know what’s in the pipeline. You owe it to yourself AND your clients to have a successful, thriving business.)

You need to have the mindset that marketing your business is JUST as important as doing the client work. Without the marketing, you WILL always struggle.

However, with that said, there’s no need to panic because…

2. You don’t have to do it all alone.
There’s no law that says just because marketing is a priority means you need to do everything yourself. You can (and should) build a team. In fact, I would go one step further and tell you your team can ALSO help you with client work or admin work or just about anything.

Now with marketing, as with anything, there will probably be tasks you need to do yourself. But there will be many tasks you can easily outsource. The trick is to figure out what tasks you really need to do (and make time to do them) then outsource the rest.

But, I can hear you saying, what if I don’t have the cash flow to outsource? See, that’s the beauty of outsourcing marketing. There’s a very clear ROI. So let’s say one new client is worth $500 a month. Do you think regular marketing will bring you at least one new client? Of course. So maybe you set aside $250 a month for a virtual assistant to help you with some marketing tasks, knowing one new client will more than pay for your VA and any more clients above and beyond will be gravy.

(If you need help with marketing strategy to know what to outsource, drop me an email. I create marketing strategies for my clients, as well as do the work for them.)

3. Start small.
This is what I did in my own business. You’ll notice I have a lot of marketing tasks going on right now — I have my newsletter, I blog, I podcast, I’m on social networking sites, I’m doing direct mail. I didn’t wake up one morning and say “I’m going to start everything today.”

No, I did things one at a time. I started with my newsletter, then I added blogging, then podcasting, then social networking, etc. After I mastered one task, I went on to add another. So my marketing wouldn’t seem so overwhelming to me.

But remember, the biggest thing is to actually DO something. Start taking some action in your marketing, and the rest of the pieces should start to fall into place.