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Authors: Inc The Staff of Entrepreneur Media

Start Your Own Business (68 page)

BOOK: Start Your Own Business
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In today’s business world, you’re no longer chained to a desk by a fixed phone number (that only rings at your office), and you’re not required to use an oversized desktop computer that contains all your important data. Internet connectivity, powerful mobile versions of office tools, and new phone services (not to mention the latest cell phones and wireless PDAs) are loosening the ties that bind and making physical location more about convenience than necessity.
VIRTUALLY ON THE ROAD
 
T
hanks to the latest technology, there’s a wide range of products and online services to help you become more productive. The Apple iPhone, for example, offers thousands of business-oriented applications that allow users to truly customize their phones and transform them into the ultimate time management, contact management and personal productivity tools.
 
 
For the on-the-go entrepreneur, the trick is to choose technology-based tools, whether it’s an iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, netbook or laptop, that best fits your work habits and style, and that you’re most comfortable using. After all, you want to boost your productivity, not drown yourself in technology that’s not appropriate or overly complicated for what you need it to do.
Many entrepreneurs have the equivalent of fully equipped virtual offices in the laptops, cell phones, PDAs and BlackBerrys they carry around. Some enterprises have even become virtual companies with workmates spending most of their time in separate locations and meeting only occasionally. Basically, you’re “in the office” whenever you’re telecommuting.
The goal isn’t to do away with the traditional “office,” it’s to use networking and communications technologies to turn it into your “extended office.” Your extended office isn’t a real, physical location; it’s virtual, just like the internet is virtual. You can’t touch the internet, even though you can touch one of the servers, routers or fiber optic cables on which it depends. The internet is a convention on which we all agree—just as we agree that you’re in your extended office when we reach you by cell phone on a Bahamian beach.
 
TIP
 
While computers and mobile devices run using a wide range of different operating systems, most are designed to operate seamlessly in a work environment. So if you’re using an Apple MacBook Pro laptop, for example, you’ll have no trouble transferring data and files with co-workers or clients using Windows-based computers. In fact, you can even run Windows-based software on the latest Macs.
People have been teleworking for decades, but our current degree of mobility is a direct outgrowth of the internet and the mobile devices that allow us to easily connect to the internet from anywhere.
Equipping Your Virtual Office
 
Even though you may be starting your first business, you’re probably fairly experienced with desktop and laptop computers, tablets, wireless PDAs, cell phones and smartphones, as well as other productivity equipment needed to get your enterprise off the ground.
 
SAVE
 
Depending on your needs, you might not need to invest $1,500 to $2,500 for a state-of-the-art laptop. If your main tasks when traveling include surfing the web, word processing and spreadsheet management, for example, a less cumbersome, smaller, and lightweight netbook may work for you just fine. The latest netbooks cost only around $300.
One unfailing characteristic of consumer and small-business technologies is that each new iteration delivers more for less. Depending on how much mobility you need, you may find yourself buying more individual pieces of equipment than in years past, but the price tag on each one is guaranteed to be lower than last year and the year before that. In fact, prices fall so rapidly that office technologies depreciate at an unusually high rate. It’s not that they’re shoddy—quite the contrary. But their resale values are continuously being undercut by cheaper and more powerful successors.
Therefore, you should think about office tools and technology slightly differently than you do other durables. Here are a few truisms that need to be taken into account when buying hardware (although they don’t necessarily apply to software):
• Even the most expensive office item, the desktop or laptop computer, is dirt cheap by historical measures.
• Whatever you buy and whenever you buy it, it will appear expensive and underpowered compared to succeeding versions. New computer technology is available every three to six months. The computer you purchase brand new today will be outdated by more powerful equipment within months and will probably need to be replaced altogether within two to three years if you want to stay current.
• Theoretically, office equipment pays for itself in a very short time by enhancing your productivity; it then helps you make money by letting you do whatever you do faster and better.
Treat your current technology-related purchases as a simple business expense rather than the investment in capital equipment it actually is. Irrespective of how you treat these items on your tax return, don’t try to extract the value of this equipment over years. Yes, the products will work just fine and continue to deliver productivity for years. But their costs are likely recovered within weeks or months—no depreciation calculations required (see “It’s Now or Never” on page 437).
That’s not to say you shouldn’t get the best buy you can. Cash is always precious. But so is your time, and price tags are usually overshadowed by the return on investment from most office products. The real issue when shopping for office equipment is whether the new machine will deliver a higher rate of productivity than the old. It’s a mistake to try to squeeze the last bit of usefulness out of older equipment when a change could result in higher levels of moneymaking. Keep it only until something comes along that will deliver still higher productivity.
Being Well-Connected
 
The first concern in equipping yourself and your office (virtual or otherwise) is connectivity. You have an expanding constellation of stuff, and it’s more important than ever that it all work together for maximum effect. Efficiency today means being well-connected—both inside and outside the walls of your company.
Even if you start off as a solo operator working from a home office, you’ll want to connect electronically to clients and suppliers and possibly share proposals, spreadsheets and other data files. This not only requires phone, fax and instant messaging (IM) connections but usually some level of compatibility among productivity software, IM services, and handheld wireless devices. That used to mean sticking with only the most popular operating systems and applications for seamless data transfer among employees and business partners.
Today, however, PCs can communicate easily with Macs and BlackBerrys and with iPhones; any peripheral that connects to a computer via a USB connection will most likely work with all computers on a network. Sure, you may still encounter minor compatibility issues, but for the most part, exchanging data and files is easier than ever, regardless of what type(s) of computer equipment is being used.
 
WARNING
 
eBay is great, but like any real-world marketplace (or any website with a community), you’re going to find scammers with ingenious schemes to separate you from your cash. Always buy and sell through a third-party escrow service, like PayPal (
paypal.com
), and be very careful with your personal information. To help you find reputable sellers online, pay attention to customer feedback, scores and ratings.
At your office, the network is the thing that helps you coordinate your tools—both those inside the office and out—and share them and the data on them among co-workers and partners. Networks include your local area network, Bluetooth connections between devices, cellular connections over a wide area and, of course, the ultimate backbone, the internet.
It’s not really our portable devices—laptop computers, cell phones, wireless PDAs, netbooks and tablets—that extend our office. It’s this infrastructure that networks all our devices together and provides quick and easy access to shared information, both in-house and outside, via global network providers.
It Takes Two
 
Even if you’re starting as a sole proprietor, you really should have at least two connected computers. It doesn’t have to be two desktop computers. If you travel a lot, one could be a laptop computer or netbook.
It’s only a matter of time before your hard drive crashes, you get a virus, or there’s some inscrutable problem with the first PC’s on/off button—whatever. Computers are very durable, but all equipment can fail.
What will you do if the machine holding your critical business information happens to be among the 100,000 computers lightning strikes every year? Even if you’re among that fraction of users who have their data backed up somewhere, how long will it take you to run out and buy a new computer, and add all your usual software configured the way you like it so that data can be read? How many hours or days can your business be offline from customers and business partners?
 
TIP
 
Remote backup services, such as
Carbonite.com
, and the extremely low cost of highcapacity external hard drives make it easy and inexpensive to automatically and continuously back up your data. Now you have no excuse for not properly backing up your data so if something happens to your primary computer, you can be back up and running, without losing any data, within minutes or hours—not days or weeks.
BOOK: Start Your Own Business
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