Office Max!

Good processes make a good team. At MobME, I’m implementing a few things I learnt while working at Uzanto: Daily End-Of-Day reports for the team, SCRUM in the morning, and constant communication via a small office and approachable managers. The work atmosphere is relaxed, and people are given time to learn. There’s no fixed time for lunch or a quick smoke. There’s an attendance register and people are held accountable for their work and leave.

If you have been following my blog, you would know that I am in the process of setting up a small office home office. I am trying my best to find furniture that will not take up too much space, like computer carts, for instance. Since I have quite a few computer systems at home, I have set up LAN networking and now I need to buy one of those LAN Racks too. I don’t know, do you think LAN Racks are necessary for my kind of set up?

This weekend was the first annual Seattle BizJam, a conference and networking event for small, independent businesses. During the Ignite lightning talk session, I presented some tips on sustainable business practices for the small office.

2) I am being completely honest in my contacts with prospects and in the offers I’m extending. I am open about being a young company that is building a portfolio and satisfied customer list. This has seemed to be one of the most effective pieces of the puzzle. On the whole, I have found that small business owners are amazingly open to and even excited about helping out other entrepreneurs.

George Jones of InformationWeek has written a very handy eight-step DIY guide for installing and securing a wired and Wi-Fi local-area network for your home or small office. Here are the steps:

WE are doing some renovations at home. My old home office is to become our TV/Entertainment room; shower screens, cooktop and lightings are being replaced. It will take a while to complete because we haven’t finalised the lightings. Anyway, here are some pictures of the progress so far :-

Do You Have Family Support For Your Home Based Business Idea? Starting a business is challenging and difficult. Even with money and inventive ideas, family backing and emotional support are primary ingredients to success. Home based in itself means that more than one person will be affected by changes in environment and living conditions. Many home based businesses falter because owners fail to take into account the adjustments that naturally occur when working out of the home.

Puget Sound Energy has at long last restored power to headquarters. My home office is thankfully warm and cozy again...and there is power to run the computers, telephone, and fax machine, which I'm truly thankful for.

This is the first project I’ve come across that’s exclusively pursuing green commercial tenants. The concept of a small office building that contains a community of sustainably-driven tenants is intriguing. Of course, the final piece of the puzzle for an owner interested in the idea is what kind of premium it might expect to receive from such tenants. The article discloses very little about those that Baum has already signed up- not even how many square feet of space they’ve leased- so my thoughts here are mere speculation.

As a preface to the story you should know that I work in a small office and that I work for a Baptist organization. This all means that mostly all of the bosses are men and mostly all of the employees are white. I'll also put out there that I'm not racist just because 1) I am not and 2) I'd hate for you to think I am. I'm not going to go in to explaining all the ways I am not racist because when people do that they always end up sounding defensive and, well, racist. Okay, end of preface.

We are VIRTUAL. We are VIRTUAL. We have now a small office in the amazing virtual world of SecondLife. If you don’t know what SecondLife is, I urge you to visit it. There are more than half a million subscribers that have created a place to work and to live. Yes, there is an actual economy based on the Linden Dollar, named after the creators of SecondLife: LINDEN LABS. There is an exchange to with the regular dollar which fluctuates depending on offer and demand. There are people making more than 100K a year in this amazing place where people design their own avatar, clothes, object, buildings; which they sell from L$1 to L$30,000 or more. JUst for reference, the L$ closed yesterday at L$288.1629/$1.00

But there is a catch, it’s called “cost of sale.” Essentially, because the SMB market can include SoHO (small office, home office) or single proprietors, this market is not only very cost conscious, but the sale has to essentailly be a “no touch” sale, in other words, a very low cost sales process. The cost of acquiring customers also has to be low.

It also means that nonprofit organizations, small business owners and regular individual Americans who cannot afford to or don’t want to pay extra will have their sites run slower and, as a result, will get less traffic.

Ever been to a friends house and you’re kind of bored and then you see it? The laser pointer, usually resting comfortably in the drawer in your friends Dad’s room. You never have one at your house it’s always the kid with the techno-shaper-image-bald-headed-geek-mozilla-firefox dad. I guaruntee that if you scavage the depths of your house, through loam and dirt, you will never find a laser pointer.

Hourly rates that you charge your clients are very closely related to the ultimate success or failure of your business. Your hourly rates must be high enough to sustain your income needs and not so high that you drive away your sweet spot, small business, target client.

Conversely, I think blogging does help the little guys. Small businesses can benefit from a personally written and regularly updated blog. It can get that business some exposure in places they may not otherwise be able to afford to advertise. It can get a listing in Google right next to companies like Microsoft or AOL. Levelling the playing field. It is possible. Blogging is more for the small companies than it is for the big companies, despite the cries from some marketers and evangelists about how all Fortune 500 companies should be blogging.

One problem with the SEO game is there are so many players that it can be hard for a small business to win. But there are many other marketing strategies that can be used effectively to drive business to your website.

The National Federation of Independent Business (the nation’s largest small-business advocacy group) has released some interesting statistics about the role of American small businesses:

Overall, this past week was productive but I wasn’t as efficient as I had hoped. I’m still on track with the plan devised earlier this week but I was distracted with setting up the home office. I have been caught up in a cleaning and purging frenzy. My anal-retentiveness kicked in and I cleaned/reorganized every corner of my 1,050 sqft apartment. I was able to donate 10 large bags of unused clothing and shoes to The Salvation Army.

I met John Ford at the Greensboro Web Design Meetup he was running last month. Over the following week, we traded emails and eventually decided to share portfolio and application ideas over a six-pack in my home office.

(4) You can even run a LiveCD Router in case you want to share and firewall your broadband connection and use WIFI in a small office.

Successfully working from home or in small offices can require the same work rules and decorum that's expected of the regular Rat Race CPAs working in big offices. By one measure, there are 80,000 tax and accounting practices in small or at-home offices, and another several hundred thousand employees working at home for firms and companies.

Increase your reach to the 21.1 million small businesses worldwide using PCs without servers. Learn how to target potential customers and maximize the use of Microsoft small business marketing campaigns. These practical sales guides, based on market research, are available only to Small Business Specialists.

I tend to write regularly about the Internet, because the Internet has been a major factor in freeing small businesses from the confines of our small size. The Internet has given us the ability to compete with larger businesses. The low-cost, open Internet architecture has made possible all those startup Web 2.0 sites.

You solve the problem of illegal immigration by attacking the real problem, which is the demand that makes it worthwhile to take the risk of entering the US illegally. When I was hired by my last employer, I had to provide information to them that allowed them to check my immigration status. It was one more cost to a small business that the Feds had imposed, but necessary to prevent them from hiring an illegal and fueling corporate demand for labor.

It is time to apply the knowledge you have obtained thus far and put it to real use. A very common application of PHP is to have an HTML form gather information from a website’s visitor and then use PHP to do process that information. In this lesson we will simulate a small business’s website that is implementing a very simple order form.

It’s a dangerous game that a small business owner(SBO) plays when he/she delegates responsibility for managing the companies financials solely to the company Office Manager, Bookeeper or Accountant. Some SBO’s don’t even run their business’s with a set of books. Instead they prefer the “checkbook methodology - if there’s money in the checkbook we are doing ok”. Understanding your companies financial position daily is key to high powered growth and long term sustainability of your business. Having an employee use Quickbooks, Peachtree, Solomon or any other of the accounting packages marketed for the Small to Medium sized business without utilizing the capabilities of the software yourself - is indeed a dangerous game.

So this morning I have an interview with a great company. An environmental non-profit that I would be proud to work at (with, of course, a little disillusionment with how the sausage is made) So I had to once again do the dance. You know, the dance of interviewing for one job while still at another. Little things like trying to find someone in a small office who can serve as a reference, yet not let everyone know that you are interviewing make the dance very complex. Oh, and finding ways to take the time off to go to the interview (which is scheduled to be almost 2 hours long! So much for sneaking out at lunch..) are a whole nother dance.

Give Democrats the task of measuring the health of the nation's small business climate during a time when Republicans are in control of the Oval Office and Congress, you are bound to get a skewed result.

According to a new proposal being considered by a suburb of New York City, any business or home office with an open wireless connection but no separate server to fend off Internet attacks would be violating the law.

I’m sure everyone’s aware of our larger cities across America selling the naming rights for pubic buildings built with taxpayers funds to private corporations…… I, personally, think this is criminal and should be viewed as a “conflict of interest” in that it is nothing more than an unfair business advantage and not only gives the impression that the particular city approves this corporation’s product over its competition, but also gives the impression that the corporation built the building (i.e. “The Ford Centre” in OKC) and is doing severe damage to small business and only goes to prove that America is run by big business and we’re in big trouble…… We have laws that concern separation of Church and state because of the reasons I mentioned above……. So-o-o, where are laws that apply to the separation of business and state or did our forefathers just not think we could possibly get this greedy?……….

Microsoft Small Business has written an article on the five most Wi-Fi friendly cities in the United States. The 5 cities are:

At any rate, Hubby still has a small office there, mainly just for his computer to check grain markets and stuff like that. She does the same thing to him - shoots out of the house and sits there randomly chattering while he's trying to work. It doesn't matter if he's on the computer, or if he's out in the shop, she wants to talk. About Everything. She chatters like a magpie about people he doesn't know, doesn't care to know, and could care less about. He said once she uses more words to say less than anyone he's ever met. That's pretty accurate. But, hey... WYGD?

A little over a year ago, I took my first office job since ’93. (I hated that one. Small office, psychopathic boss, and working for a company whose ethics were “questionable”. Never regretted tendering my resignation there.) This new job is in a professional, yet casual, environment. They are very strict with hiring requirements, only taking people with 5-years management experience, or having graduated in the top 5% of your curriculum’s class. So you can imagine my dismay to find that, despite everyone here being fairly well educated, academically or real world experience, that the same sort of juvenile behavior I have come to expect from retail employees is present in this environment.

Suddenly two of my teachers and the receptionist entered with of the men close behind. I assumed my staff was giving them a tour of the school but then I saw a gun in the man's hand and I felt a cold wave of fear sink into my stomach. I stood up as he roughly pushed us into my office next door. The small office quickly filled with people as the other gunman herded all the teachers and students out of their classrooms. We were forced to crouch on the floor with our heads down. Then one by one we were ordered to stand and empty our pockets and purses of money, watches and jewelry in the open briefcase that was sitting on my desk. As one gunmen kept his eye on us the other grabbed the only other American who worked at the school and forced him at gunpoint to open the front door for students as they arrived for the next session. One by one they entered my office, eyes wide with fear, as they obeyed the gunman's orders to give up the goods. Then one of the gunman forced the receptionist to open the cash register and to carry the school's computers to the car parked in front.

SMALL LAW FIRM VS. LARGE LAW FIRM: The size of the law firm has absolutely nothing to do with how well that office will represent you and/or handle your case. A large law firm (10 or more names on their letterhead) will not impress an insurance adjuster into giving you a better settlement. On the contrary, adjuster s who ve been around, know that huge law offices have multi-million dollar clients with mind-boggling legal problems. Because of this those types of law firms often do not put the time (nor concern) into a several thousand dollar personal injury case that a small office would. The bottom line? You ll receive more and better attention from a small law office. Many of the best personal injury lawyers operate within the confines of a law firm with only two, three or, at the very most, four associates.

Cisco Systems today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held KiSS Technology A/S of Horsholm, Denmark. This represents Cisco's second acquisition for its Linksys division, the recognized leading provider of VoIP, wireless and networking hardware for home, Small Office/Home Office and small business environments.

The consistency of the luxury-equals-cold pattern in the experiment was striking. The book-strewn NoHo offices of Workman Publishing - which had a recent best seller with the lowbrow "Bad Cat," a collection of amateur photos of strange-looking cats - were 76.0 degrees. The sleek, impeccable SoHo lobby of Scholastic, which publishes the best-selling Harry Potter books, was a chillier 73.0.

Windows XP contains its own firewall. A firewall is a security system that acts as a protective boundary between a network and the outside world. Internet Connection Firewall (ICF) is firewall software that is used to set restrictions on what information is communicated from your home or small office network to and from the Internet to your network.

the people here are pretty cool and very diverse. its a small office - only 10 people - but there is something to like about every one of them. they all have their individual strengths and play very well together as a team. i’m excited to get to know everyone better and make myself a valuable member of the team.

Office Depot. Office Max. Staples. They all suck toad toes. Worse than being useless, they have driven out of business all of the really good small office stores. Years ago there were several in town, and a visit to any one of them was a treat. First, you knew whatever it was you wanted, they had it. No doubt about that. Unusual sized refill note pads, pen refills for those oddball ballpoints, whatever. They had it. These stores were not that large. Maybe about two or three times the size of a standard convenience store. But their shelves were stocked full of office supplies. They had more items, and more different types of office items, than any Big Box Office Superstore, hands down.

A complete reference for new Linux users who wish to set up and administer their own Linux home computer, workstation and/or their home or small office network. Note: this is a newer version of the this guide, then the previous link to it.

Windows XP is configured to help you take care of networking. It uses the TCP/IP protocol for networking in workgroups, or what you might call small office or home networks that do not use a dedicated server.

I've been sending and receiving email "on the go" for well over five years. My solutions have always involved the PalmOS. I've never had to resort to a "redirector" from my desktop/laptop email client. There are a variety of approaches to mobile and wireless email. Daniel Taylor speaks to the solutions and ongoing problems in "Mobile e-mail solutions for small business".

The gap between FrontPage and Blogger is a very wide one and there is probably room in that space for more than one product, so Bubbler appears to be well positioned, though if I were making a recommendation to a small business client at this point, I’d probably point them at Macromedia Contribute hosting instead of Bubbler. It’s not an apples to apples comparison, but Contribute has a lot more features and a lot fewer bugs and the $99/desktop price difference is mostly made up for by the cheaper hosting costs for a reasonably sized team.

Samsung have combined both a colour and black and white printer together with a high speed modem to produce this colour fax specifically designed with the small office home office market in mind.

One of the most exciting and daunting things about starting your own home-based business as your sole means of income is the reality that no one is responsible for your success or failure but you. The lure of the home-based business is undeniable. But before joining the revolution, take the time to think about the real implications of self-responsibility. In the past, you've always had the security of knowing that your employer was taking care of the background details ... you know, those little things like retirement plans, health insurance and capital investment. And making enough money to cover your salary and vacation time. Now it's all down to you.

Sometimes it's hard to remember everything thing you need for your home office. This is a pretty good list. Click above for more detail. You can get all this stuff at Office Max.

It’s coming up on a year since I joined the ranks of the self-employed and I realized last month that it was high time for me to get some general office essentials and set up a few things to help me run my business more effeciently.

* Got voice mail (instead of an answering machine)
* Got some decent phones (decided to get a system with a base and additional handsets)
* Got a flatbed copier/fax/printer (HP 6110)
* Got a bunch of misc. office supplies

Still on the list:

* Business cards - I had them designed but Illustrator ate the file. :( It won’t take long to redo the design. I’ll be getting them from GotPrint, their prices are really good and I saw a sample card that looked quite nice.
* Automated backups of my local machine and server. This is coming along too, I’ll have more on it later.
* Network enable printing on the HP 6110

With the contract gig I’m working on now, I need to invoice the company as well as send in an expense report with receipts, etc. My digital office wasn’t really set up for paperwork, and there are times when you need to print, copy and mail things. I’d been going to a local store to make copies of all this stuff when I needed to and it was really inconvenient. I love being able to run a quick copy of something I’m mailing off.