Posts Tagged ‘Advice’

The Dallas Morning News:

There’s a brush fire bearing down on your business. You have one hour to evacuate – which means you have one hour to execute a disaster preparation plan.

This is a scenario similar to what thousands of small business owners face each year. Luckily, that’s enough time to take care of a company’s most valuable assets – its employees and its data.

Disaster prep is one of those tasks that many small-business owners keep putting off.

While it’s understandable that some owners don’t get around to disaster planning, they’re courting danger.

“This is wrath-of-God stuff,” said John Toigo, a disaster recovery consultant based in Dunedin, Fla.

Minimal preparation – the kind you’d have to resort to if a disaster were in fact on the way – can be accomplished in an hour. And you can do much more if you have an entire day.

Toigo said the first thing to be done is to put together a list of contact phone numbers and physical and e-mail addresses for everyone on the staff, and to be sure everyone has a copy.

Luis Yepez, vice president of Mainstream Global, a Lawrence, Mass.-based computer reseller, said that it’s also important to know how you’re going to stay in touch with your clients, customers and vendors. They need to know your situation because what happens to you affects them.

Toigo noted that it’s easy to pop a flash drive into the USB ports of your computers and back up all your information, including customer and vendor lists, your firm’s books and inventory lists and the projects you’re working on. You can also e-mail data to a non-work address for safekeeping.

Photo by Timm Williams

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

 
photo credit: Stabilo Boss

With online businesses growing before our eyes, I feel it is important to provide these online business owners with as many tools to help them in their venture as possible. We all know that you can never have too many resources and helpful suggestions to fall back on. Below are some great tools that I recently saw posted on CrowdSpring that will come in handy for your online business.

• Google Website Optimizer is a great free tool that is easy to use for anyone and allows you to test several different conversions on your site such as text and image conversions.
• Gmail Apps. This is a wonderful tool that supplies you with several different applications such as state of the art email, calendars, and intranet solutions for small businesses. The best part about this program is that it comes at a low cost to you.
• Campaign Monitor. This is probably one of the more important applications that you can find on the Internet at such a great price. This tool is great for online and email marketing campaigns, tracking your results and managing your subscribers. With marketing branching out in all sorts of different forms, this tool would be perfect for online small businesses.

Basecamp is a web-based project collaboration tool It allows a team to share files, assign tasks, centralize feedback and manage projects.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

 
photo credit: madebytess

When setting out to hire new talent for your company, the challenge of finding the absolute best there is can be very frustrating and time consuming. With so many people out of work today, you are bound to have hundreds of applications rolling in just for one position to fill! I have put together a suggestion list of ways to ensure you find your company the very best there is out there.

• Background checks. Always, always, always do a background check on every person that you are seriously contemplating to fill your position. You may think by their resume, references and interview that they are just awesome, but you never know what they have been able to cleverly hide up to this point in life.
• Give your serious candidates a personality test. People can “fake” their way through almost anything in order to get a great paying job. But if you perform a personality test, it will give you a good sense of the type of person they really are and if they will fit well in with all of your other employees.
• Manage Smarter suggests performing a drug screening test. Yes this is become more of an issue today. Actually, a recent study showed that 75% of illegal drug users are already employed somewhere! Why take the chance of getting into that situation and jeopardizing your companies reputation.

Expose the candidate to the work and the work environment: Give the candidate a realistic understanding of what the day-to-day work will be like. Don’t just paint a pretty picture. It’s best to be honest with candidates about what the job entails, including the high points and the low points.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.