Business: 21st Century Business – Hand Your Tasks Over to the Web

21st Century Business – Hand Your Tasks Over to the Web

Written by Jason OConnor

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Want to know how to put more of your revenue in your pocket AND free up time to do repparttar 104882 important things for your business? All business owners can save time and money if they properly leverage repparttar 104883 Web through Web services. What I am referring to is replacing recurring tasks that take employee time to accomplish with web-based services that do it automatically.

If you are a small business owner, you probably do many day-to-day tasks that take up a lot of your valuable time. Your time is better spent doing repparttar 104884 things you’re in business for than regularly completing every little business administration chore. A common complaint I hear among small business owners is that they spend too much of their time on “business” issues like accounting or mailings instead of repparttar 104885 “fun stuff” that their expertise is in.

Now you can have it both ways, thanks to repparttar 104886 Web and repparttar 104887 strength of Web services. The idea is that if you shift your time or employee time away from tasks that can be accomplished via repparttar 104888 Web, repparttar 104889 newly saved time can be spent in more productive and lucrative ways.

I can give numerous examples of Web services for any industry, but for repparttar 104890 sake of brevity, I will offer a few that will hopefully stimulate your own creativity.

1) Pricing

Do you have prices on your Web site that need to get updated regularly? If you have many products, and a price list that changes sometimes, it may save employee time by putting all repparttar 104891 prices in a database (if they aren’t already) and making your Web site dynamically database driven to pull repparttar 104892 pricing out of repparttar 104893 database in real-time so repparttar 104894 pricing on your site is always current.

This saves time in a number of ways. First, if a particular price is listed in a number of areas on your site, than you have to pay someone to make repparttar 104895 update in each place every time repparttar 104896 price is changed, or spend your time doing this. Maybe your pricing stays repparttar 104897 same most of repparttar 104898 time, but what about when you run specials and discounts?

Another way this helps is that your entire company can now refer to repparttar 104899 Web to get repparttar 104900 most updated pricing. Let’s say you run a special and decrease repparttar 104901 price of a product. Do you contact all your sales people and tell them about repparttar 104902 discount? Do you print out a copy of repparttar 104903 updated price list and send it to everyone who deals with customers? By making this a Web service, you would simply change one entry in your database and refer everyone to repparttar 104904 Web to get repparttar 104905 current price. Any company information that regularly changes and you spend time disseminating ought to be automated using repparttar 104906 Web.

2) Sales & Marketing

Let’s say a typical sale, whether it’s done by you or your salespeople, takes fifteen minutes to close (when speaking to an interested or ‘hot’ lead). Let’s also say that half of repparttar 104907 fifteen minutes is spent explaining what your product or service is or how it can help improve their lives. You find that you repeat repparttar 104908 same basic selling points over and over again. What if you could create a Flash presentation that does this for you? The presentation could be loaded on your Web site and linked on your home page. You could refer people to this presentation and cut your sales pitch in half.

NEW YEAR'S REVOLUTION

Written by C.J.Hayden

No, that's not a typo in repparttar

title. Resolutions are easy; most of us make them at least once a year. A revolution, on repparttar 104873

other hand, is something you may not have made since you started your business. Starting a business is actually quite revolutionary. When you began yours, there were probably many details of your life that changed. Some of those changes were intentional, others accidental; some you liked, some you didn't. Other changes you always meant to make just never happened. Is your business everything you meant it to be? Is it giving you all that you wanted? Are you satisfied, even delighted with repparttar 104874

way your life as a business owner is turning out? If not, perhaps it's time to make a revolution. Here are some revolutionary ideas you might consider: 1. Serve only those clients you care about and enjoy being with. When you work with people you don't enjoy, everything becomes a struggle. Your clients are a key part of your business. You wouldn't hire someone you didn't enjoy working with, so why let them hire you? Begin today to let go of clients you find difficult to work with, and start seeking out those you really had in mind when you started this business. Have repparttar 104875

courage to refuse new clients that don't fit your picture of who you most want your business to serve. 2. Make a plan to reach your income goals. Unless you are independently wealthy, your business not only needs to support you, it needs to provide for your future. Setting goals for your desired income level is a good first step, but to reach those goals, you need a plan. Create a financial model for your business. How many clients, appointments, billable hours, or contracts will it take to generate repparttar 104876

income you want? How much of your time will be required to do that amount of work and do repparttar 104877

marketing required to get it? How much money will it cost you in overhead, marketing costs, and admin help? Does repparttar 104878

model work? 3. Take enough time for yourself and those you love. The number one reason entrepreneurs name for going into business is time -- more to spend with their families, more flexibility in work hours, or simply more control over how their time is spent. But how many of us actually get this?

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