Making Life Easy

I realize that this week's posts seem to be centered on technology. But as a business owner it is imperative that you discover and using any and all tools that allow you to get to the most important part of your business, as quickly and effortlessly as possible. While you don't get paid to select the best computer or office equipment, making good selections can make your life easier. The last thing that you need in a busy day is to have your computer stops working, or for you to experience problems with your software. Today I'd like to talk to you about incredible tool that will help you get through the administrative tasks quickly and allow you to move on to finding new customers or providing service to your customers.

Microsoft Windows 7 contains within it a powerful speech recognition technology. It's like having a secretary taking down dictation for you. All of your correspondence, forms and e-mail is all so much easier to deal with when you have a powerful speech recognition tool available. I'm using an inexpensive gigaware a USB stereo headset (which is Skype certified) and the powerful new Microsoft Office 2010, in combination with the speech recognition tool available in windows 7. Set up was easy and the microphone performed well.

So now I can type as fast as I can talk. Which frankly, as much faster than I am capable of typing. It's amazing to watch these words appear on the screen, exactly as I intend them to. If you've ever used speech recognition in the past, you'll have to agree that it could be a bit difficult. The computer doesn't recognize the words you mean to say, leading to typos that took too much time to go back and correct. But you will find that the new speech recognition technology is amazingly accurate right out of the box. And of course, you still have the opportunity to teach your computer how you speak. As you go through the process of teaching your computer your speech patterns, as well as making corrections in text as you speak it, the computer is less likely to make errors. You'll find with today's new technology that you will not be as frustrated as perhaps you were in the past. There is an end of sentence absolutely no reason to put off the decision of use speech recognition call technology any longer. Life and success really are all about choices. And ultimately that comes down to two fundamental choices. Those choices are; 1) what do I need to do to get the results that I desire? 2) can I make choices and be happy with the results I'm getting? "Success is nothing more than choosing to do the right thing, at the right time, consistently." What is the right thing? The thing that produces the results you want. When is the right time? Now! So you can continue to say use the old fashioned way and either type correspondence out yourself, or hire a secretary to do it for you (which I highly recommend, as an assistant can do so much more for you), if it's in the budget. Or you can make a small investment in today's new word processing and speech recognition technologies.

 

Coach Frits

Here’s a Great Profit Improvement Tool – Part 2

As an update that underscores the ease of use and versatility of this tool, I want to report that I have made 22 new blog posts in under an hour. Pretty cool. So let's consider how this tool saves you the added expenses of upgrading your office computer system or systems.

Forget the fact that software now costs more than the computers that we're buying, the biggest expense of a new computer system in the office is learning to use the new productivity tools, especially if you are the only "employee" of your Small Office/Homes Office based business. If you aren't familiar with "opportunity cost," it is simply defined as the possible profits that you could have earned by using a resource differently; in this case it's the resource of time that we are considering. As the only employee of your company, you need to be busy doing whatever it is that customers pay you for. If you don't have enough customers yet, then the most valuable activity that you can be engaged in is Selling. Even if you are a tech support company, your time is best spent fixing other people's computers, or improving other businesses computers, rather than working on your own computers. There is a legend that great businessman Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic (known as the god of manufacturing," I'll post his story later) once walked into one of his manufacturing plant offices and saw a "computer" sitting on an employee's desk (it was actually the monitor). Legend has it that he picked up the "computer" and in front of his astonished staff walked to a window and threw it out. He proclaimed that "computers do not work, people do." I am certain he was aware of the power of the computer, but he wanted to make the point to his employees that they could get bogged down. Certainly, the learning curve of a new system is just like that. Some of you may remember WordPerfect, after they took over WordStar's market (yes anyone who remembers WordStar and Lotus, and even Word Perfect is as old as Steve Jobs and me. Of course I remember when word processing was an electronic typewriter with a small 1x4 lcd)? If you do, you'll remember how we had a new learning curve. We used keyboard templates, and competing software companies had "WordPerfect commands" capabilities wherein we could switch back to WordPerfect commands because it was too difficult to relearn the new Microsoft commands. It seems almost laughable to today's generation of computer literate workers. But that reality helped us to understand that when new technology was purchased, we had to pay attention to the training element of learning how to use the new equipment.

Today, that challenge is made so much greater as we have to learn how to integrate all of the equipment in our office, while at the same time learning how to get it all to work with the Internet, Networks - both physical and virtual, email and email Clients. It has simply gotten to be too complex. Have you ever felt like you have become the Computer Help Desk or Tech department in your small business? Have you ever felt like tech requirements and technical support (calling up the mobile technicians and paying them to fix a problem that wasn't' there yesterday)is draining your working capital as well as your precious time? The entire Office 2010 suite seems to have the potential of eliminating most of that. Buy Word 2010 (of course, you're already seeing that I would recommend buying the entire suite), and you won't have to go through reading a "Cloud based" service's "help pages" trying to figure out how to get it and your word processor to talk to each other. With the growing cloud computing model, it was time that a software company figured how to simplify all of that for us. Once again; bravo to you Microsoft, for getting it right for us and making it so we can focus on our businesses not our office equipment.

Last, but not least, it seems that Microsoft's marketing department has been working in unison with the Developers, and made "getting Office 2010" as east as using it. The new pricing model is in line with our needs as small to medium sized business owners. In addition to being a more affordable pricing model, Microsoft has made it possible to "try it, before you buy it" buy allowing free downloads of the Office 2010 beta. The new suite of tools is scheduled to arrive on store shelves in June, 2010. I strongly suggest that you download it now, and see if you aren't as excited about its features as much as I am.

Here’s a Great “5 Minute” Business Improvement Tool

If you're like me and millions of business owners around the world, you are trying to use "Social Marketing" to your advantage. In your Social Marketing mix, you probably have a blog that you manage, just like this one. I manage 12 Blogs, along with 2 Social sites. That would seem a giant task, too large for anyone to manage. I'm no "superman," I have just found tools and advisors that help me, and I'd like to share one of those great tools with you.

Microsoft Word 2010

This may read like a tech page, but believe me, it's a very important part of our businesses toady. I strongly encourage you to read this to the end, unless you're already a raving fan of the new software, and are pretty confident with it's new features. Why didn't I refer to the entire set of work productivity tools now named Microsoft Office 2010? A great new marketing approach by Microsoft is that they will offer each Office 2010 product as a standalone application. So now, if you choose, you can buy just Microsoft Word 2010 by itself. Additionally, the entire suite of products is being offered under some great new pricing models. Along with "Upgrade," you'll also find "Card Key" which allows you to unlock pre-installed Office 2010 software when you buy a new computer. Lately, software prices have been higher than some new computer prices.

I am so excited about the tight integration and ease of use of Office 2010 that this may appear to be a Microsoft commercial, or ad. I assure you that I am not on Microsoft's payroll. Why am I so excited? I was just complaining to my wife how computers and software require a technical level of expertise to "keep it all working." Microsoft is changing all of that. A new standard is coming back to the tech industry. That new standard will only bring us, as consumers and businesspeople, ever improving ease of use and reliability standards we could only dream of (wait 'til you see how easy it is to set up your e-mail accounts in Outlook 2010 – but that's another story).

You will marvel at how easily you can link all of your blogs to Word's new "Blog Post" feature. No more "running around" the net logging into your one or many blogs. You're in control from the "Blog Post" tab in WORD 2010. Gone are the days when you had to learn different ways to spell check or format your bog post when using different service providers. All of the spell check, insertion, formatting and other features that you've become so comfortable with; are now all available to you when you're typing that next blog post. This is all possible from within the comfort of Word. Have you ever experienced the frustration of "fixing" spelling errors, or formatting errors, only to lose the entire document because your blogging server timed you out? That won't happen with Word, because the only time you will interface with the server is when you click on "publish." Combined with the power of your voice recognition capabilities, it won't get any easier until Microsoft figures out a way for us to think it and get it on the page. It's that good. More in the next blog.