Saturday, February 20, 2010

Working At home? Here Are a Few Rules

Working at home is brilliant. What a great way to spend the day. Wearng a comfortable beat up t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts while you sit at the PC and type away all day :D.

Oh wait...I just got a new Bioshock 2 game...hmm...I think I will play that for a couple hours. Heh...time to eat. I guess I will watch this movie while I do that. Done eating? Gotta watch the rest of this movie I guess. Ahhh...let's take a nap :D.

So many distractions at home, but working at home is amazing. You just have to figure out how to keep the distractions to a minimum and keep the work flowing. Unless you are like me and you put it off to the last minute and then cram like you never crammed before almost every week ;). For some reason i am one of those people that needs to be up against a deadline to produce. Odd I know. Maybe I can find a weight loss product that tells me if I don't get that weight off by such and such a day that I am going to get put in jail :).

8 Work At home Rules for you to learn ;)

Regulation and You: Drowning in Red Tape

Believe me when I say I know what it feels like to spend half the day filling out ridiculous forms, and doing it in a way that is incredibly inefficient. Yes, I used to work in the finance industry and the SEC was not a friend of technology. Paper, paper, and more paper were filling hundreds of file cabinets in my office. Every client had a phonebook sized file full of documents and forms that would kill 6 trees.

Every single day my partner and I would be insanely annoyed at the arcane way all these files had to be kept. It wasn't kept this way by our choice. We certainly would have loved to store our hundreds of clients on ONE little flash drive with 50 back ups on 50 other flash drives We could literally save 1000 square feet of space alone with our 50 flash drives of info. A nice 4 GB flash drive would be enough to last us until we retired, literally. IT would save us thousands of dollars a year, and thousands of hours of meaningless paperwork. Time that could be spent doing much more important things like expanding our business, or even as silly as looking through phosphacore reviews.

Fortunately many business owners have the option to "Let Someone Else Do it!" (Homer Simpson's campaign slogan for Sanitation Commissioner is brilliant). Here are some ways to get this done.

Astrology and Your Business

Sometimes it gets a little boring reading about serious stuff all the time. As a business owner you likely don't buy into any supernatural crap, or crazy astrology ideas, but I thought it was entertaining to see what this author came up with.

This by no means is an actual astrological article with all the crazy luck and fate things you would get with a cheesy newspaper horoscope. This is just a neat little way to express some points that the author wanted to express while using a well known idea. The whole thing is written as a horoscope, but is there because it wants to talk about trying to predict the future of your business. Foreseeing the possible problems, taking advantage of insight, a better exposed acne treatment to look better, and anything else.

Finding a Mentor

You want to be Bill Gates? Well good luck. He claims his mentor is Warren Buffet. The two richest men in history together. Do you want a mentor, and how do you even go about finding one?

One thing I have always noticed is that I always have questions about something. That isn't just reserved for little kids. We always have something to learn and there is usually someone that knows a lot more about it than we do. It is only natural to seek out like minded people with more experience in the areas you are interested in for help. Of course finding someone willing to help you may be a completely different matter. It is a bit difficult to connect with someone on that level. IT takes dedication from both the mentor and you as well. Just because you both like arcona doesn't mean you are a great match. Your philosophies may not be in line. Your ethics off. Maybe you change yours because of them.

Well...I am no expert in finding a mentor, but I did read a pretty good article about such a task earlier today. Check out How to find a Business Mentor and let me know if it helps.

ARe the Yellow Pages Dead? Should You Use Them To Advertise?

If you think about the Yellow Pages in your phone book, do you automatically just assume that a lot less people use them than they have before? My first inclination when I think of them trends that way, but then I step back and realize that I use them all the time. I mean I spend the majority of my day on the internet while in the office, yet I still pull that phone book out when I want to find something. IT is actually easier than finding it online in most cases I have found.

Why is that? It just becomes way too much work to find a legit online yellow pages for my area. While it should be easier I never seem to find a standard site that helps me as fast as just looking in a book that is alphabetized and categorized already. I don't know if I will ever use the net to find a local phone number. It's way easier to use the book.

So...you use the Yellow Pages to advertise? Well...let me tell you from a person that uses the internet AT LEAST 8 hours a day that I still use it. Now if I want to find weight loss products I may go online, but if I want to find a Lawyer, Doctor, or copy store in my area I am not looking online for it.

Even with just Yellow Pages advertising there are many extras that these places offer now as well. The high-tech changes came about partially out of necessity, admits Bob Mueller, executive director of business operations for AT&T Advertising Solutions.

"There's definitely a transition going on in the marketplace and in local search," he says. "The print usage of Yellow Pages has declined, but only slightly. Not as much as some people would think, but there's no doubt that consumers are going to [more varied] platforms for their local business search information. Local search is not a zero sum game. For an advertiser to have access to all those places the eyeballs are going, they need to have a presence in each of those places."

Business Struggling With Debt? Here Are Some Tips

If your business doesn't have debt you must not be doing a hell of a lot to maximize your return, or trying to expand. One of the greatest gifts to a smart business man is his ability to use other peoples' money to buy what he needs and play them back after he rakes in a healthy profit on their money.

Of course there are times when the debt becomes a bit troublesome. Sometimes you need to step back and take a look at what hell you are doing a bit more closely. Maybe you lost touch when you were more busy thinking about what prenatal vitamins to buy your wife, or you just felt like going on a drunken bender. It's OK. Life has more than just work doesn't it? Yes. That shouldn't have been rhetorical.

If you are having issues with business debt here is a good article about getting back in the black.