How much time do you spend during your working day handling email?

This single task has become one of the biggest time wasters as emails flood in all day long demanding our attention, yet often being trivial.

For too many people, and I’ve been one, it becomes a constant interruption tool, preventing us from working effectively.

Your time is precious and too many people reach the end of the day exhausted and dismayed that they didn’t achieve everything on their to-do list after all.

The first rule is to turn off email notification, or if you can’t, keep your email program shut. Most people can’t resist stopping their thought train to look at that new email, but in a busy day this is the worst thing you can do. Sure your customer might appreciate a fast reply, but actually you are training them to interrupt you more often!

The second rule is never to check your email first thing of a morning. This is probably one of the hardest rules, but you should aim to complete your highest priority tasks by 11am every day and if you start by checking emails you are likely to miss this deadline. Can you imagine having a major task completed before lunch every working day? How would this impact on how you feel about your job or business?

Set aside a maximum of half an hour to check your emails in the middle of the day and if you must, check them again in your last half hour of the working day.

You can even set an automated reply letting people know you won’t deal with your email until the end of the day. This sounds harsh at first, but it stops them phoning you to ask why you haven’t responded as fast as you used to and interrupting you anyway.

People  tend to handle and forgive anything if you explain it to them.

Do you have a good business practice agenda in your business?

How do you decide what is good business practice for your own business and how are others doing it?

There is a new online tool that has been created for Australian Small Business providing a platform that will enable small to medium businesses to establish their own responsible and sustainable business practice agenda. St. James Ethics Centre and the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia in collaboration with Australian Businesses, has developed the Good Business Register.

The site is secured by log in and will allow you to build and publish your Responsible Business Practice Profile as a marketing tool that showcases your company’s image and reputation building trust and understanding.

You can print your profile, save it allowing you to use it within any other marketing strategy documents or send or publish the link to stakeholders, customers, suppliers and staff.

Currently this is a free online tool and can be completed incrementally to your time constraints and as your business grows or changes.

The site is based around 5 principles of responsible business practice – Financial sustainability, Inclusive workplace environment, Promoting responsible business through the supply chain, Active engagement with stakeholders and the community, and Minimising the impact of business activities on the environment.

We are all subject to a range of responsibilities and obligations that govern our day-to-day business operations. These obligations define minimum requirements we must meet within our business and information on them is provided within the register. However the register is about encouraging business to go beyond compliance – to be more aspirational than merely complying, and provide you with the platform to showcase this important competitive edge, improving your image and reputation.

Click here to register and use the Good Business Register

What does this mean for your business? How do you manage information and knowledge? There is an overload of knowledge out there, but without context effective management it can become a liability instead of an asset.

There are four dimensions to consider: people, subjects, software and time. No matter what technology we are using, people are still one of the most important reservoirs of company knowledge and all too often when they walk out the door, the company knowledge they take with them may never return. The first step to developing a knowledge management strategy is to identify the key people in your business that provide knowledge and develop a system to retain and share that knowledge.

There are many technology solutions available to implement your knowledge management strategy. The best system is comprises a range of tools. Blogs, wikis and even social networking online enables you to capture knowledge in real time in a way that is tactical rather than academic, whilst developing networks that can last beyond individual people who may come and go.

Social bookmarking such as delicious provide a way of tagging information on the net and sharing it with others. No longer will you lose all those bookmarks and favourites when a computer crashes, and by sharing these bookmarks within a structure, your entire staff can access and add to the information they need from anywhere. I personally often go straight to the delicious bookmarks that belong to a leader in my field and reap the benefits of her research.

Still none of these things are likely to work well without developing a strategy, so locate someone in your business with a high level of company knowledge and work with them to begin to capture and manage this to your best advantage.

Remember being told computers would create a paperless office?

I hear complaints that more paper is generated than ever before and the paperless office is a myth.

How did we get into this situation and what can we do about it?

The obvious place to start is at the printer.

Recycling paper whenever possible does assist reducing waste. Train yourself and your staff to stop before printing and ask ‘why am I printing this?’

If you have no valid reason - don’t!

$4.2 billion is spent annually on Australian business postage. Add the cost of paper, ink or toner and much of your profit is being wasted, apart from environmental considerations.

Most large companies have introduced electronic billing, but many small businesses have not yet followed this practice. I’ve seen small business offices printing a copy for the client and a copy for the office. This stems from the old practice of having a carbon copy invoice book, but the analogy is incorrect. If you created the invoice electronically, your carbon copy is on the computer. The problem is that often that they don’t trust the computer and want their own hard copy. Still the expense piles up and affects your bottom line every day.

Information has become a huge business commodity and staff are constantly downloading large documents from the internet. Best practice is to store that document on a network and share it electronically with all staff, rather than end up with many printed copies of the document, especially if it is going to be outdated in a short period of time.

I was stunned yesterday when I attended an online conference and all attendees were instructed to print a 58 page reference document!

There is a terrific widget, free for small business, that tracks paper usage on a network allowing managers to identify where the heaviest printer usage is coming from and begin to combat the issue.

I was reminded the past couple of weeks, of the power there can be in the written word, published on the internet.

A lady started an entity on facebook, rather than a page for herself, and people could become fans of this entity. I’m sure she knew that the entity would attract some fans, and more than just a few, but I wonder if she expected the number of fans to increase the way it did. I wonder what she thought when it reached the first 100,000?

Businesses are starting to use mediums such as facebook and twitter to communicate with their clients and some types of business are finding this very successful.

Still this case I have in mind was not a business themselves, yet

the following continued to increase, and not only that, the following began to impact on a large business to the point that they influenced that business to undertake a business activity that I doubt would have been taken otherwise.

I became a fan about 4 months back, but at that time had no idea the power this facebook entity was about to have!

The fan base increased and went over 200,000 and the power of sheer numbers caused Channel 9 to take action.

Many of you reading this have probably guessed now what I am referring to, but if you haven’t just consider the power of internet publishing – to attract a following that this morning has reached 334,673, and persuad a television station to air nearly 7 new hours of a show that finished 10 years ago. Add to that the fact that they rocketed to become the world’s largest following on twitter and you have a powerful medium indeed.

Whether or not you liked Hey Hey It’s Saturday, the phenomenon of how the internet was used is an incredibly interesting case study for business.

As part of Small Business September I attended a seminar this week that looked at managing disasters in business.

There were many tips given and food for thought chewed over, as this is such an important aspect of business but one often neglected due to pressures of the daily workload or being unsure where to start.

I like to think that I am a fairly good business manager, but it highlighted areas I haven’t really given thought to, and I have 3 areas I need to attend to.

A great point made was to realise that you may be able to carry on business reasonably well with one disaster, but a combination may put too much pressure on without a plan in place.

Whilst small business need to plan for disaster, they may have higher impacts from different types of disaster than big business.

For example a sole trader has a disaster if they are seriously injured, whilst a big business would absorb this.

Some tips to think about when planning:

Secondary supplier arrangements can help manage dependencies.

• Keep a copy of critical contact details in your emergency kit for communication during a disaster.
• Know who is in charge within a chain of command
• Notify stakeholders such as banks, customers, landlords and make arrangements for the delay period.
• Prioritise who you can service to retain core business.
• Check your insurance coverage is relevant to your business and possible scenarios.
• Enable staff to work offsite to offset being cut off from the place of work.
• Each business is different in structure, products and services, so some tips will be more applicable than others.
• There are templates available online that you can use to create your plan so that it is relevant to your own situation.
• Don’t wait for another flood to realise you still haven’t instigated disaster planning, and remember floods are only one type of disaster we can find ourselves experiencing.

One of the issues we face in business by using digital systems for handling our data is keeping the data secure. This issue of security has increased further by computers being connected to internal networks and to the internet.

There is a range of ways that data might be lost or inadvertently exposed to the outside world and you may not have considered them all.

When considering this security most people will think primarily of shadowy, criminal hackers sneaking around the internet attempting to break in. However more businesses lose data as a result of hard drive failure or software bugs.

In many cases, data loss or leaks of data result from mistakes made in business processes rather than malicious entry to the system.

There is a complex web of legislation in Australia that governs what data companies must keep for their records and the security precautions they must take to ensure security of that data for their customers. However the Federal Privacy Act is exempt for businesses with a turnover of less than $3 million. Surely though smaller organisations should be just as keen from a public and customer relations point of view to take privacy seriously and be compliant with this act?

One of the publics greatest concerns is probably centred around the retention of their credit card details. Because data storage has become fast and cheap, many companies keep a lot more information than they used to. Many smaller companies use a payment gateway on the internet for credit card transactions (which is a similar equivalent to using an eftpos machine on the counter), as this avoids them ever holding this sensitive data on their own system.

Businesses need to consider carefully from the outset what information they collect from their customers and how they can secure the retention of it.

Clients often tell me that their computer is starting to run slowly.

There are a range of causes, but one of the common things I find when I look at the machine is that there is anything up to hundreds of files and folders sitting on the desktop.

File management is a critical yet simple skill with any computer, but one of the most overlooked ones!

When a computer ‘boots up’, it has to load into RAM (memory used whilst you are doing things on the computer) everything stored on the desktop. So if you keep saving (or dumping) things there, you have less and less memory to use. If you have lots of RAM, then really having a few files there whilst you are working won’t make any real difference.

But even if you have plenty of RAM and you have hundreds of files there, not only do you have an incredible mess, your computer will become terribly slow.

If you use a MAC, another common problem is a large amount of files and folders in the user folder. This can cause real issues with the computer including corruptions of the user account.

Try to think of it this way – imagine if you had a big storage cupboard at work. Instead of building shelving and storage bays, you just left it bare and each time you got something you opened the door, threw the stuff inside and quickly shut the door again.

Then when you wanted something you rummaged through everything just piling things up all over the room.

How long would it take you to find what you wanted, and how often would you fail to find what you needed?

A simple filing system will solve a lot of problems in the long term as well as save time, which of course in business means saving money too!

Even the simplest mobile phone can be used as an effective business aid.

The power of text messaging should not be underestimated!

Companies are using text as a cheap, simple and non-invasive way of communicating with clients.One of these methods is to confirm appointments. Imagine that you make an appointment some days or weeks in advance.
	The day before the appointment you receive an sms message reminding you of the appointment and asking you to confirm it. Many people receiving these messages don’t realise how much money a business can save by these confirmations.Staffing levels are affected by the workload, and it is astoundingly surprising how many people fail to show up for appointments with a business.
If you had 4 staff rostered on one morning and they were all booked up for the whole morning, then you know that your wages are covered and some profit is to be made. Imagine if even 10% of those appointments fail to show. This could result in losing the entire profit margin, and if the percentage is higher could mean that the business does not take enough in to even cover the wages and expenses for the morning.
The simple text confirmation could allow the business to schedule other clients in to fill those slots, and at the least allows them to schedule effectively.There are systems available that allow your customer management system to generate automatic appointment reminders by sms. This means that you do not need to dedicate time to going over each appointment and creating messages.
Businesses also use messaging for marketing. Personally I am not a fan of receiving marketing to my mobile, but I know others that love it.It is important that the business first establishes permission from the client to market to them this way. Otherwise it is just another form of spam.

As business owners we are constantly thinking about how to increase productivity, reduce costs and increase profit margins.

This can be done by encouraging ongoing professional development for staff, and including staff in business innovations.

Staff who feel included, feel ownership of the directions a business is taking and are far more likely to contribute quality innovation ideas and carry them through.

The Far North Coast is bursting with incredibly innovative businesses, even if the large percentage of our businesses are small businesses.

We have active chambers of commerce and many support mechanisms.
We also have access to many forms of training options for professional development both for business owners and staff on all levels.
With the advances in technology we are often able to compete with city business in ways that were impossible only a handful of years ago.

Keeping up with technology and the potential business increases it may offer is a challenge that we all face.
Smart financial planning and monitoring is more effective with the aid of technology as is marketing and strategic planning.
All these activities however require the use of different technology tools and different skill sets, and you can’t expect one person to possess them all.
I love seeing a business invest time in round table staff planning and finding the strengths each staff member brings to the business and maximising on those strengths with professional development targeted to each strength or potential strength.
Many of us don’t like to recognise where our weaknesses are, particularly if we are the business owner.

Smart business however means exploring how a team can cover all the strengths the business needs and working together.

Versatility is a business strength, and continuing staff education and development is one of the smartest business strategies you can put in place, for example how versatile is the use of mobile technology in your business?