Data Supplies Blog

Is It Inefficient For You To Do Your Own Admin?

When you run your own business, we know that there are so many things to worry about. Marketing, admin, communications, finances, legalities... and that's before you've even considered doing what it is that your business actually does. 

Often, business owners spend a great amount of time doing these more administrative tasks - meaning that they have significantly less time left to do whatever it is that they do best. Whether you're an illustrator, a photographer, a recruiter or a consultant - your main skills miss out in favour of the time you have to spend on your admin.

There is a problem with this. Spending time doing things other than your specialist skill can be incredibly inefficient. Why? Because the hours you spend sifitng through emails, or making appointments, or answering the phone are hours when you can't earn money for doing what you do. 

Ask yourself how much your hourly rate is. Then, ask yourself how many hours per month you spend doing administrative tasks and work out how much money you could make from doing your specialist skill during that time. Once you've come up with this figure, you'll likely find that it is significantly larger than the cost to employ a virtual assistant like us to do the administrative work. 

Using a VA to do your administrative work frees up more time for you to do what you best, and make money from it.

Planning for The New Year

Welcome to 2012. Here at Data Supplies and Your Reception Desk we hope you've had a restful holiday and saw in the new year well.

For many people, this time of year is the time for making resolutions. Whether it's to get fit or to save money, millions of people are resolving to be a little bit better personally in 2012. We think that businesses should be doing the same thing. This is the perfect time for business owners to look back at 2011 and the successes and problems that came with it. Doing this is vital when it comes to making plans for the new year. Which direction will you be pushing your business in? How will you seek to grow and increase sales? How will you overcome last year's problems?

A lot of success in business is down to good planning. The first few weeks in January can often be a quiet time; meaning that it's perfect for taking quiet time out to do this planning. We recommend taking out your business plan and reworking it so it can act as a guide for you in the coming twelve months. Be honest and realistic about what you want to achieve and why you haven't yet been able to do it. Think carefully about the services and people you could seek out that might be able to help you. 

How will you be planning for 2012?

 

How 'Green' Are Your Office's Communications?

A key question for modern day business owners to ask themselves is how 'green' their office workings are. This is important not just for environmental reasons and issues of corporate responsibility; but also because a 'greener' office tends to be an office that is more efficient cost-wise. New habits such as making sure all the lights and electronic equipment are turned off every night can make a big difference to the environment as well as to your electricity bills. If you're looking for general ways in which you can make your office 'greener' we wrote a post last year about how a virtual assistant can make your office more environmentally friendly. 

Today, however, we're asking a specific question about your office's communications. How 'green' are they?

Filing

Have you moved to virtual filing yet or are you still insisting that staff print off every email? If you're on the latter side of the fence, you might want to think about changing your mind. Filing in this way is unnecessary and uses a great deal of resources. Think how much ink, paper and electricity you would save if your policies didn't insist on this. You could use the money to invest in a really good off-sight backup system (such as an online system) instead. 

Inter-Office Communications

The great majority of offices are now using email for all of their inter-office communications. This means that instead of printing correspondence to send through an internal system, they do so instantly via email. However, many offices still insist on seeing copies of work or programs on paper - paper which is then thrown away once decision for a second draft have been made. Encourage your staff to do viewings like this on screen instead - and think again how much paper and ink (and money!) you would save.

Use Internet Faxing

Though fax machines are a largely outdated piece of equipment, some people are still insisting on using them. Get around this problem without having to use a fax yourself by using an internet fax service. A service like this will allow you to send and receive fax documents to and from fax machines through your computer. You'll still have a fax number - you just won't have to waste the paper or energy on receiving messages. 

How do you keep your office communications green? We'd be pleased to hear your tips. Leave us a comment below or tweet us @takingyourcalls

Email Management: Some Tips

As part of the virtual assistant and telephone answering arm of our business, Your Reception Desk, we offer an email management service. Because of this, we're well aware of the techniques for managing your emails successfully. We've put together a few tips to help you to do the same.

Get into a routine. 

We've read many an article online from individuals who claim that they never check their email until lunchtime. Though there is certainly a productivity benefit in doing this - we don't suggest that this is a pieve of advice you follow. If you don't check your email, there's always the chance that you might miss an opportunity! Instead, we suggest that you do check your email in the morning - but that you don't necessarily feel obliged to deal with all correspondance right away. Instead, think about marking emails that require further attention (most email clients will allow you to 'flag' emails in some way) and returning to them once you have got a portion of your work done for the morning. 

Get organised.

Again, almost all email clients will allow you to create folders to store your emails within. Once emails have been dealt with, get into the habit of moving them from your inbox into a specified folder. This will make it easier to find them at a later date if you need to refer to them. It will also mean that your inbox will be a lot emptier, and a lot easier to manage!

Think carefully about subscriptions.

Almost all of us receive various emails that we are subscribed to, either on a weekly, monthly or daily basis. Think about whether you really want to receive these emails - for example; ask yourself if you have ever bought anything as a result of receiving emails from a certain company. If the answer is no, unsubscribe from them. Both you and your inbox are likely to breath a sigh of relief for doing so!

 

Productivity Tweets

Yesterday afternoon we noticed a couple of tweets between two of our clients. 

The first, from design agency GAAP Studio, read;

"Quite amazing how much work can be produced when you choose to get the phones answered, leave emails for 5 hours and not tweet or browse!"

We then noticed a second client, IT support company Cooke IT, replying;

"@gaapstudio isn't it just. It's one of the many reasons I love @takingyourcalls."

Besides enjoying being complimented by our clients, we also thought that this was a great example of time management. For many small business owners, this can be a constant battle. Administration, banking and finance tends to take up a lot of their time; time that could be spent actually doing what it is that they are in business to do!

Though communication (whether online, offline or over the phone) is the backbone of small business workings - we think that sometimes it is important to switch off. As GAAP Studio said yesterday, shutting yourself off from the many communication methods we now use can be the perfect way to tackle that project you've been struggling with. It can help you reduce your backlog and really get stuck into getting work done!

In fact, though many of our clients use us regularly to cover their phones for them while they are out of the office - many of them do so while they're in the office and just need a bit of space to themselves. We think that this is a great productivity technique. 

How Efficient is Your Office?

In challenging economic times its important to ensure that your office is as efficient as possible. Whether you take a closer look at equipment or staffing (or preferably both!) it's important to consider all the places where you might be able to make savings. 

Below we've suggested a few places to start if you would like to improve the overall efficiency of your office;

Energy Efficiency

Consider switching to laptop computers rather than desktop computers. Laptops have been shown to use up to 80% less energy than their desktop counterparts.

Make sure than you turn off all equipment overnight. It seems like a no-brainer, but in most offices at least a few machines get left on. Make sure than computers are completely off not just in sleep mode, and that all printers have been switched off too.

Keep your office equipment up to date - equipment often gets less efficient the older it gets. 

Storage and Organisation

An unorganised office will lead to inefficient staff, as they will spend much of their time looking for the documents and information they need. Invest the time to put together a comprehensive system.

If you haven't yet digitised your filing systems - this would be a good place to start.

Save Space

In the 1980s and 1990s, desktop computers and other office equipment took up a great deal of space, which is way 'L' shaped desks became very popular. However, these days computer equipment has got a lot smaller; meaning that large desks aren't quite so necessary. Consider cutting down on desk size as well as getting rid of unneeded filing cabinets in order to be more space efficient.

Outsourcing Staff

Consider using outsourced staff rather than full time staff. This means that you are only paying for the time you actually need, as well as the fact that you are saving on electricity costs and desk space. 

Obvious areas to outsource are administration staff; this can include book keeping, telephone answering, transcription and order processing among many other things.

 

To speak to us about making your office more efficient, whether that be by investing in new equipment or outsourcing your administration - contact us.