In our consulting business we help people sell software for millions of dollars but when it comes to our own business we don’t pay a dime for software.
One of the ways the smaller businesses can increase their cost advantage over the bigger guys is the way they use information technology.
The corporates are hide bound by all those IT department guys who insist on locally hosted, client server, applications and synchronizing systems on PCs and servers. They come out with all sorts of justification for their “strategy” but usually avoid mentioning their main motivation – self preservation. After all, if the users to could everything they needed for free, with somebody else looking after all that sysadmin complexity nobody would need an IT department. These guys would have to go get a proper job.
But the advantage isn’t limited to the fact the software is free and there are no support guys. Internet software is increasingly being written to add more value than just the data processing. It makes us more effective, by taking away the complexity of doing things well.
Here’s our “free” IT architecture with a few comments about some value add.
Planning, Scheduling and Client Relationships
Front Office Box is our choice for managing our operations. We’re Ambassadors so get a five user account free of charge. It’s much more than CRM and Project Management. It enables us to see our business in once picture, from all the different angles. More than that, it makes us better managers without us doing anything. The guys have built Plan>Act>Review into the workflow so we just use it. We don’t need to know this has been the core of the management consulting industry for 60 years, or that it’s based on a philosophy described by Henri Fayoul a hundred years ago. We just use it, and are better at what we do as a result.
Mail, Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations
Google is our choice here. We have our own domain and Google hosts it for us, for free, so we can have “proper” email addresses (not xxx@gmail.com).
Like everything Google does, Gmail is good and bad in parts but the good outweigh the bad by some distance. The first is virtually unlimited remote storage. Anybody who has ever lost their Outlook file will understand how important this is. The second is the SPAM filtering which is absolutely first class. I haven’t actually done the calculation but my guess is the filter gets it wrong for maybe one message in a thousand.
Documents has had a pretty rocky road for something that started out as the web’s best word processor (Writely) but the only trouble we get now is sometimes the servers can’t keep up with the page refresh and scrolling screws up the page. The value add is “sharing” documents, spreadsheets and presentations with other people, as web pages, and of course the remote data storage so we can forget those security back ups (which we never did anyway).
Google sites gives us content management, although it has a long way to go, and we have hosting accounts for other reasons so use those in preference.
Accounting
A long time ago I worked as an accountant and CFO so don’t get intimidated by accounts and tax returns. We keep everything simple in records of income and expenditure in a Google spreadsheet. Lots of people do something similar but we’ve been a little more sophisticated. On page 1 we have this months transactions with balances across all accounts automatically calculated. On page 2 we have the entire year with totals in columns, with actuals for months past and planned for months outstanding. On page 3 we analyze our credit card spending.
At the end of each month we reconcile the accounts and update the “year” and “credit card” pages, then “save as” the sheet to set up the next month. We’re always bang up to date, we always have a forecast out-turn for the year and year end accounting takes less than ten minutes. Of course we could do this with Excel, but then we’d have to buy Office (which anyway is crap on Mac) and worry about those security back-ups.
Blogs
Our choice for blogs is WordPress. Its free software and they’ll host for free as well. There’s a huge range of design options and lot’s of goodies provided by other people. Especially interesting is a new service from VodPod that allows us to display videos inside the blogs.
Phones
Skype just keeps getting better. Skype to Skype now works really well and of course of free from anywhere to anywhere. Skype Out lets you call ordinary phones, landlines and cell phones for what amounts to pennies for calls. There are all you can eat plans that effectively mean for less than $20 per month we can call anywhere in the world for as long as we want.
Others
We’ll get to talk about other solutions over time but need to mention Vimeo for video hosting and DropSend for file transfer, both of which are elegant, simple to use and FREE.
