There are so many ways to run a business, and there may be other ways to do it that you’ve never thought about before. Samantha Dean from BlueprintHQ tells us more about the innovative revenue model. (more…)
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There are so many ways to run a business, and there may be other ways to do it that you’ve never thought about before. Samantha Dean from BlueprintHQ tells us more about the innovative revenue model. (more…)
Are you healthy as an entrepreneur? We are all busy workers. We all work too hard. Karen Pyke from Inspire Wellness joined Josh to spread her message about how important it is to have a healthy mindset.
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A systematic approach in business is a methodical and organised way of approaching business tasks and decision-making. By defining processes, breaking down tasks into smaller components, and establishing procedures and protocols to ensure consistency and efficiency, businesses operate in a more effective and efficient manner.
Ken Lundin joined Josh to share his expertise about having a systematic approach to business and tips on how to further optimise your business. (more…)
Finding the ideal clients in business is an essential step in building a successful and profitable company. By identifying and targeting these ideal clients, you can focus your efforts and resources on the most promising prospects, increase your chances of closing sales, and build long-lasting, profitable relationships with your customers.
Paul Kennedy from PGV Consulting joined Josh to talk about all things regarding growing your client base. (more…)
Hiring a business lawyer is a crucial step that most companies will have to take at some stage. Having a qualified legal professional on your side can provide a multitude of benefits, from protecting your company’s interests and assets to offering guidance on complex legal issues. Whether you’re starting a new business, expanding into new markets, or dealing with legal disputes, a business lawyer can provide the expertise and support you need to succeed.
Katie Richards is a commercial solicitor passionate about systematisation and efficiency who is the CEO at Law on Earth. She joined Josh to talk about why and when you should hire a business lawyer and all the tips and tricks that you need to know.
Improving your business strategy is a fundamental aspect of making your business better. It helps your company stay competitive, adapt to changes in the market, and achieve its goals and objectives. Jason Button from JB Strategic is a business strategy expert who has a strong background in government and private sector experience as well as in stakeholder management. Jason joined Josh to discuss how every business can improve their strategy so they can continue to grow and succeed in the long term. (more…)
You might be wondering why customers sometimes love you and sometimes don’t. Floris Blok from Blok Business Consulting is a customer experience expert who took the time to sit down with Josh and talk about the customer journey, the customer experience, and what it all means. Read on or listen to the Business Built Freedom podcast below to learn how to improve and measure customer experience, and what to do if you feel overwhelmed.
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Communication is one of the most important aspects of any business, and improving how you do it can make a huge difference to not only your bottom line, but your workplace happiness too.
Marlise van der Merwe is a business engagement partner at the Alternative Board who is an expert in systems management, service delivery, team dynamics, and the role of communication within the workplace. She joined us to pass on her knowledge on effective communication and how you can reap it’s benefits.
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Are you wondering how you can find grants, funding and support programs from the government to help your small business grow and succeed? You have amazing ideas and you know you can succeed in business if only you can get funding. Or your business has been growing and it’s time to expand. You can apply for a business grant or business growth funding.
The business world can be unpredictable, but having a well-thought-out business plan can be the difference between success and failure. Marty Lewis is a training director that helps people bridge the gap between great skills and a great business. Marty details eight steps to follow when it’s time to prepare a business plan. What Marty says is a must-read or listen for any prospective business owners, or anyone interested in starting a business.
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Are you questioning your leadership potential? Are you seeking to cultivate your leadership abilities and establish yourself as a leader? Tim Stokes from Profit Transformations offers insight into how to become a leader and maintain leadership development within your organization. Listen to our podcast or read below as he delves into the importance of developing leadership skills and the key aspects of being a successful leader. (more…)
The pandemic has shaken up businesses all over the world, but our love for technology did not fade a bit. COVID-19 and the lockdowns just shifted our use of technology. Some might say that the pandemic brought a mixture of blessings and curses to tech providers. Most of us started using technology we weren’t using pre-pandemic, while some ditched their favourite tools in favour of ones that are more suitable for working remotely or telecommuting. Here’s a rundown of the way COVID-19 caused a shift in the way we use technology these days.
How has technology helped us during COVID-19? People bid goodbye to conference rooms and said hello to video conferencing tools. Zoom among other online conferencing platforms have become a staple in households as business meetings and even classes have moved online. More people started to become familiar with Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, and some companies even started satellite projects like extensions for specific industries like finance and customer service.
For those who want to host their own videoconferencing system, they can turn to Jitsi, an open-source tool. We’re all about security here at Dorks Delivered and Jisti is all about that. Plus, it can be a cheaper option for videoconferencing.
With people working from home, office management tools designed to simplify office work have lost their purpose. A lot of people stopped using software for scheduling conference rooms as well as hardware like proximity sensors for conference rooms.
While people work from home and can’t have face-to-face meetings, many business owners and project managers realised the importance of technology during COVID-19. Collaboration tools have become quite useful to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Slack, Trello, Microsoft Teams and Workplace From Facebook help us discuss, organize, and track all of our work in one place.
No more boards on the wall or papers spread across tables. Everything is on the online whiteboard or Kanban boards, whichever you prefer. In fact, we love Trello so much that we made an episode about it even before the lockdowns started. If you’re one of those considering working at a distance post-pandemic, these tools will be quite useful to your team.
When the lockdowns started, we couldn’t help but emphasize the importance of security. Decentralised environment poses dangers, but it doesn’t mean we can’t work remotely. It just demands a higher level of security we now call zero trust—no one and nothing should be trusted. No business can be complacent when it comes to network security. Internal programs should work as usual when run outside your office but everything is authenticated and encrypted.
Listen to Business Built Freedom’s ‘COVID for Computers’ episode to learn more about the dangers of working from home and how to avoid them.
If you want to identify the vulnerabilities of your current remote work strategy, sign up for a free assessment.
Like work, exercise and entertainment are now done mostly at home.
While a few still prefer to go to gyms or run outside, many people now appreciate workout and fitness apps and websites. Business owners have realised the demand and started to turn to software developers to keep up with the shift in how people get products and services.
Subscriptions for unlimited access to entertainment sites and apps are also in demand. Whatever your business is, it doesn’t have to stop running. Your customers are not gone, they’re just staying at home. You just have to start to think outside the box and take advantage of the available technology to make it happen.
With most stuff done online, cloud companies have been there when we needed them the most and demonstrated the benefits of technology during COVID-19. They expanded to absorb the demand from individuals and organisations that rely on technology for video conferencing, collaboration, and even entertainment. Just be aware of the Top 10 Cloud Computing Security Issues and Challenges and take precautionary measures.
We don’t know how long this shift in technology will last after COVID-19, but we know for sure that some technologies are thriving and helping many businesses survive these days. Some of these technologies are likely to be around and in demand for a very long time even after post-lockdown as some companies have realized that they don’t really need to require some or all of their employees to report to the office every day.
Are you embracing remote work? Do you know some quite useful tools that we forgot to include here? Let us know.
Do you need help with technology for remote work and securing your team’s home network? Contact us for tech solutions starting at $1 to achieve more with less.
[module-379]
Do you work remotely?
A few weeks ago, Renier from VoIPstudio explained the difference between VoIP and a traditional phone system, the benefits of a cloud-based phone system, using a normal phone with VoIP, keeping your current business number when switching to VoIP, the disadvantages of VoIP, and comparing different VoIP phone systems. If you haven’t listened to that, jump onto VoIP 101 With Renier Schrenk or continue below to learn more about the things that you need to keep in mind to make sure that it does appear as if the business is as usual when your phone systems are now abroad or potentially distributed between many places.
Renier: The main thing is you want a system that moves along well that you can pack up into a laptop take it somewhere else. And with that, the whole cloud-based solution means that everything is kind of already in the cloud in one place ready to go, and you just connect to it. If someone calls up, it’s not being forwarded somewhere. It’s not going to someone’s cell phone number, it’s still going through the system, so you have all of your messages, you can have your call recording style, and you can still transfer calls as if you were in a normal office.
There are lots of different types of VoIP and lots of types of phone systems, such as IDSN, IP PBX, VoIP systems, cloud systems, on-premise systems, hybrid systems, systems that have trunking, and SIP trunking. The list goes on. What’s the easiest way to drill it down and simplify it?
Renier: Many countries have made promises to shut down ISDN because it’s old infrastructure and it’s becoming redundant to an extent. Some countries have said that they’ll do that in 2020 and others in 2030. IP PBX is basically the same concept, but it’s a completely digital system, so that’s also still something that you have in the office, but it’s a bit more versatile.
You can also get a free PBX, for example, and you can run that from a normal PC. Even if you have a small requirement, you can use something like a Raspberry Pi to put on your little PBX on. That’s a digital system that runs through the Internet. It’s a cloud-based system that backs all of that equipment up and puts it on a server run by the cloud provider. This means you don’t have any hardware that you need to worry about. You just need to worry about your connection to that server.
That’s a pretty big difference when you think about it. Traditionally, PBX systems came with this bulky package of hardware. Businesses were paying thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, locked in contracts for years and years and ultimately kind of just felt like that’s the way that they had to do it.
A lot of people aren’t aware of how easy it is just to move across to a cloud system that allows you to remotely work and allows you to have a distributed office without any of that hardware. Imagine that you decide to move office from X to Y, especially if we’re looking at commercial real estate in Australia and the way that it’s working at the moment. You wonder what’s it going to cost to move everything. The beautiful thing is you can move your office two, three, or five times and there’s going to be nearly no business interruption.
Renier: Exactly right. Our team started working from home a long time ago because our very solution allows for that. So why not utilise it? And ultimately, even us as a company, we’ve saved money because we’re a company with global focus. So you need people in different places, different countries, that speak different languages. So now we can have a team member in the US, for example, which didn’t need us to buy up a property or rental property or something so that that person can have an office. You just ship hardware that they need and you’re done. Most of the things that you use already are probably cloud-based, so you might as well move your phone system too.
It definitely gives you flexibility, and it shouldn’t be something that you’re too scared about as well. It sounds like I’m spruiking VoIPstudio, but it’s just a product that we’ve come to love. We’ve tried lots of others out there, and you could probably do it yourself without having to have any other technical expertise.
Renier: Depends on the scale and how quickly you really need it. If you hustle, you can be done in a day. The main thing that takes time is migrating over to a different VoIP provider. But usually, you can have everything set up beforehand. Again, that just depends on the scope.
‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.’
– Benjamin Franklin
With VoIP, you’re not going to be up shit creek without a paddle. It’s not going to be the end of the world. It’s not going to be that hard. It’s not like you have to learn a whole bunch of other things. I’m happy to say that VoIP should have come through and done really well with us and the other businesses that we’ve been working with.
Nearly 10 years ago, Brisbane had huge floods. As an IT provider, I was asked to quickly go into Brisbane against all the rules that we’re being put in to help people remove servers and critical infrastructure. Now, the good news is for most of our customers, we didn’t have to do that because we already had the computers and other bits and pieces backed up.
The bad news is we weren’t doing phone systems. It wasn’t a part of something that we did. And VoIP definitely hadn’t really had the legs that it has now 10 years ago in Australia. And that meant that they pretty much lost their phones. They had to be on the phone to Telstra to be able to get the phones diverted to their mobiles. It was huge havoc.
Now, let’s imagine the floods happened again (hopefully, they don’t). The desk phone that you’re using, if it’s already connected to a cloud-hosted PBX system, you can just unplug that phone, take it home, plug that phone in and you’re up and running. Is that right?
Renier: Yep. And even if you hadn’t said anything up yet, go into your browser log and change whatever setting you want. Now you’re forwarding goes to wherever you need it or download the app on your smartphone. Now it’s ringing in your pocket. Download the app on your laptop, log in and you’re done. And you don’t have to contact anyone for that.
One of the things I want to talk about a cloud-based VoIP phone system is for when you’ve got a distributed office already. Let’s say you’ve got some people over in the Philippines, India, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, or the UK. As businesses are growing, more and more people are working from around the place. This gives them access to be within your own infrastructure, potentially available to do inbound or outbound calls to clients that are fully recorded with all the analytics injected into your CRM systems. Is that correct?
Renier: Yeah, you can definitely do that. For some businesses, they need that 24-hour coverage, either for inbound calls or for outgoing calls. Because you can have everybody on the same system, all of your data, all of your billing, everything is in one place. If there is some kind of disaster somewhere in the world, like an office somewhere either loses its connection completely due to a natural disaster or a damaged data centre, calls can be redirected to other teams in order to pick up that slack.
If you’re in a business where you have this very elastic team, it’s a fantastic option because you can go from having two people working with you to two hundred in two days and then really two minutes and then back down to two the following month.
Renier: Not all providers work the same way. Some contracts don’t always allow for such flexibility, so it’s just something to consider. But like most monthly rolling contract things, if you suddenly need someone, you add them, you pay, you move on. When you don’t need them anymore, you move them. You don’t pay for them anymore. We used to have a system where if you don’t need to use it anymore, you need to delete them. Now we’re a little bit different. If you need it in the future, instead of having to enter all of the data that you might need from scratch, you just edit that user, make any changes you need to activate them.
That’s pretty cool. You also can also make sure they’re all staying professional on the phone as well, right?
Renier: That’s a feature we call barging. You can barge in on the call and either just listen, whisper in so your employee can hear you, but the caller can’t. You can take over the call and make it like a three-way conference. And then at any point in time, the listener can go back to either just listening or just completely disconnect the call if they need to do. We started implementing the system, we started incorporating it ourselves. That way, you can have your Level 1 or your frontline support assisted by main support without them having to take an entire call. And they can just inject and help with little bits of information.
A big part that a lot of VoIP providers don’t have that you should be considering when you’re looking around are the cool integrations that VoIP offer. There are so many integrations that you offer to further help any type of business improve what they do.
Renier: One of the big integrations that we did recently was Zapier. They automate things, but they do it in a very smart way. You can link to so many different devices or services.
It’s an incredibly powerful addition that definitely puts VoIP Studio above the competition by a significant magnitude.
Renier: It does it in a very simple and complex way, in a sense, because it only points and basically manages all this information.
It’s very, very cool. It means that if you don’t have an integration or you’re using sort of a very bespoke product for your CRM system, Zapier is a tool that will most likely build an integration before anyone else.
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Learn more about the no-hassle VoIP phone service for business. Go to VoIPstudio or call 07 3166 5465 now!
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I hope everyone out there has got a lot more knowledge around how you can work remotely with VoIP, what to do when disaster strikes, how to integrate and use VoIP in a way that lets it be more than a phone system. I recommend that you jump straight across to VoIPstudio.com and sign up for a trial.
Renier: Yep. We don’t want a credit card. We don’t have any obligation after the trial is done. We’re reasonable people.
There’s no reason why to not try it. You can’t break anything. You’re not going to stuff it up. It’s not the end of the world. They’ve got a fantastic support team that’s going to be there to help you out.
Renier: We have a live chat and a support ticket system. Anybody that signs up will get a welcome email from us. Just reply to that and someone will be there to help as soon as we can.
Thanks, Reiner. I hope everyone learnt about the benefits of VoIP for remote workers.
If you have suggestions for new episodes, send an email to [email protected]. Stay healthy, stay good.
Need help with VoIP or other technologies for your business? Contact us and keep it business as usual with $1 tech deals.
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What is passion? It sounds like such an easy question to answer, but you really don’t know.
I’m sure we’ve all felt that feeling when we want to go to work. We absolutely love it. The day just glides by, but then other times you get to work and it just feels like you’re in the trenches and nothing happens. You think, ‘What am I doing here?’
Then when you go home and you work on that ‘passion project’, and you find the time just flies by.
How much does that piss you off? You want to spend some time on what you love, but the time goes from 6 until midnight. All of a sudden, you’re in bed and back at work the next day.
Most people don’t consider why they go to work and what is passion. This is important to think about.
What is passion? What is passion to you?
Sometimes, you might find time gliding by, while other times, it feels like it’s standing still.
It’s important to understand what’s passionate to you because, at the end of the day, you want to be doing what you’re passionate about when you go to work.
You might be in the position right now where you’ve been running a business for 10, 15, 20, or 40 years. Who knows? Or, you’ve just been working for the man for 10, 15, 20, or 40 years. It doesn’t matter.
What’s important is you have had this emotion. We’ve all had this emotion, and we all need to work out why did we feel that way when we’re doing that thing? Why do we love doing a certain thing and not another thing?
Because too many people are working in a dead-end job or the bosses of a company that they don’t really care to be bosses of. They are just looking at a way to escape.
We all need to work out a way that we can be passionate about the reason we come to work.
If you’re running a company and you find out that you’re really passionate about helping people, change the reason that you’re running the company to be more about helping people.
Bill Gates was running a software company for many years. He was helping people, but not necessarily in the same way that he’s helping people now. The major thing that changed was he understood that he wasn’t helping people through technology and that didn’t drive him. That was just one way that he was helping people. He was helping people in many different ways, and he decided to step back and understand exactly what he was doing and what drove him. That’s what moved him away from technology, a very competitive area, into what he’s doing now around making sure that people are staying safe.
‘It was always about helping people and helping people achieve more with less because I’m introducing them to new things.’
I have a similar, more Queensland-based story.
When I started my company, I really loved solving problems for people with computers. I love technology, and I love everything around it. What I’ve realised is I love finding out new ways to fix a situation that people aren’t aware of.
I don’t necessarily care about the I’s and O’s, and ones and zeros, bits, etc. I care more about helping businesses succeed by introducing them to new technologies that they may not have understood or even knew were available. Let that sink in…
I started fixing people’s computers when I was about 11 years old or something like that, and I had my first computer when I was 4. All that changed over the years. I wasn’t just fixing people’s computers. It was always about helping people and helping people achieve more with less because I’m introducing them to new things.
Why do you exist?
Why are you in business?
Why are you in your current job?
And let’s bring it back to the start there. What are you passionate about and where do you find that time just flies and you enjoy doing what you’re doing.
I hope you enjoyed this, and if you have, jump across to iTunes. Give us some love, leave us some feedback. I’m all about helping you all out. If you have suggestions for new episodes, send an email to [email protected]. Stay healthy, and stay good!
Need help with technology for your business? Contact us for tech solutions starting at $1. Achieve more with less.
[module-379]
In Savannah, GA, there are old federal buildings, such as the historic Davenport Museum, and Georgian houses like The Olde Pink House. And there’s the cotton exchange, a Romanesque-style building, in the historical area of Savannah. Let’s not forget the classic McArchitecture style we have all come to know and love. There are over 300 years of buildings in the area and all lovingly restored.
Restoration is an incredible thing to bring back something that was lost. When it comes to data, restoration can be a lifesaver but you need to be prepared. Just like with buildings, you need to create something with a strong foundation in the first place, so ultimately you’re left with something to recover rather than just a pile of junk.
There are lots of ways to backup your data. I’m often asked what’s the best option, but to be honest, it varies from person to person and from business to business. For one client, just having a USB stick with a few files in it might be fine. For another client, we might be discussing something like bare metal recovery with daily incremental backups at an off-site centre.
But no matter what your needs are, there’s one thing I can tell everyone: act now! The more prepared you are, the less damage that is done when you lose your data. Back up, be organised, and build systems and strong foundations so your data and your legacy can be around for years to come.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on 19th September 2019. It has been revamped and updated for accuracy and to reflect recent trends.
Need help with your data backup? Contact us for custom tech solutions for your small business starting at $1.
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