Reduce Your Office Expenses By $100,000 In 2009
There are many tools, products and services that are required to run your business productively and effeciently. By following the steps below and eliminating land lines, specific in-house personnel (IT person), internal VPN and Corporate Email such as Microsoft Exchange you could save your company up to $100,000 in 2009!
1. Eliminate Land Line Phones
(annual savings: $250-500 per employee)
Cancel your your traditional land line business telephone services, which range from $50 to $100 per month per line with carries such as Verizon, and switch to VoIP unlimited services for a fraction of the cost per line.
Aptela Business VoIP Unlimited allows you to call anyone, anytime, anywhere in continental USA for a low cost starting at $29.99 per employee per month (some volume restrictions may apply). With Aptela you will receive separate telephones (each phone can be used anywhere there is an internet connection) with a unique 800 number for your company. When callers call they are greated with a professional auto attendant with individual extensions for departments and/or employee as well as voicemail, fax, and many other professional features. Visit their site for pricing and plans.
2. Virtual Receptionist & Assistants
(annual savings: $30,000)
This option is most ideal for the home-based businesses, but also works well for the small business startups on a shoestring budget. The reality is for many small businesses, having a receptionist will cost anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 a year.
The professionalism of a virtual receptionist provides an invaluable perception to your company. With a virtual receptionist your customers won’t be able to differentiate between an in house receptionist answering calls versus an outsourced person. Your virtual receptionist can take calls and route them to the appropriate person in your company or take a message and email or call them with it.
Its fast, cheap and easy to get setup. You write a custom written script that addresses all the typical inbound requests. The operator then follow the pre-approved script to lead the inbound caller to the appropriate person, department or voice mail.
When I began to research the costs, I soon realized the services are suprisingly cheap as well. Depending on where you outsource these services, your fees are as little as $7 per hour, depending on your virtual assistants location and responsibilites.
Companies such as virtual assistant offer prepaid packages in the range of $7 to $20 per hour depending on the type of services being rendered. They can handle tasks like accounting, bookkeeping, market research, document creation services, phone support, customer relationship management, appointment setting and much more.
Not only does a virtual assistant create more earning potential and opportunity for you in your business by eliminating the requirement to complete administrative tasks, they also free space in your office to add additional personnel that will add to your bottom line, they reduce the costs of medical and retirement benefits, reduced your payroll taxes and there are no sick time or vacation costs associated with them.
Visit their site for more information on their pricing packages.
3. Eliminate Office Networking
(annual savings: $25,000 to $120,000)
Setting up a VPN can be extremely costly to a startup, with costs as high as $100,000 for setup fees. That’s not to mention the monthly fees thereafter in addition to the cost of the required in house IT person which will range from $50,000 to $100,000 annually.
Today you can setup a free shared intranet network or VPN using third party services like Get Drop Box. Get Drop Box allows you to easily share files and folders with co-workers with the simplicity of drag and drop. Watch their video tutorial on the homepage which explains how it works.
With Get Drop Box you simply download an application, which then creates a folder on your local hard drive. You then move all the folders and files into the folder you wish to automatically sync to Get Drop Box. The program then auto syncs the files (uploads them to their server) as a backup. You can then access these files from any location remotely by logging into your account on their website.
However, the most interesting feature is the sharing functionality, which acts as a shared drive like most offices have with their VPN. To share a file, you invite others within your organization to share the file, they receive an email, click accept and now you are both synced to share that file. Anytime either of you makes a change to that file, Get Drop Box will automatically save the files on your local hard drives with the new altered file. This is incredibly easy and convenient for anyone to use.
Get Drop Box has some rather robust features as well, such as the ability to recover deleted files or revert to old versions of existing files. So no more worrying if a co-worker ruins a financial projection spreadsheet or sales presentation!
Most importantly, Get Drop Box is FREE, thus totally eliminating the VPN costs to your company.
4. Eliminate Microsoft Exchagne!
(tota savings: $700 to $4,000)
Traditionally most companies have used Microsoft Exchange as their mail server due to its robust features. The cost for exchange is roughly $700 to $4,000 for the server license, in addition for the need of IT services when things go wrong, and lets face it, this is a Microsoft product we’re talking about.
You can totally eliminate this cost by using Gmail Apps for Business. Gmail Apps for Business is simply amazing, it has all the robust features of exchange, with $0 cost. In addition to the free services, Corporate Gmail also allows companies to protect their corporate emails with a premium email security services at $10 per user per year, for up to 10 years for their files. Google’s website describes their security service as:
“Email security archives email across your domain to recover deleted emails on a 90-day rolling basis. You can grant designated administrators visibility to the archive, and allow your users access to their personal message archive to recover deleted emails. Administrators can utilize a full set of archive search and investigation tools to respond an investigation or legal discovery request. You can quickly identify relevant emails, place litigation holds, and export messages for further review.”
As for the Corporate Gmail features, they include:
* No hardware, software or patches!
* All the powerful features of Gmail
* Access your email through web anywhere anytime
* Universal access with IMPA, POP or from mobile devices
* 25GB of storage per user
* Integrated Google search technology
* Label folders to categorize mail
In addition, Corporate Gmail offers a set of collaboration products, which include Google Docs, Google Video and Google Sites.
Have you used any of these services? What are your experiences? Do you have any additional suggestions to save businesses money?
December 10th, 2008 at 5:08 am
[...] Cancel your your traditional land line business telephone services, which range from $50 to $100 per month per line with carries such as Verizon, and switch to VoIP unlimited services for a fraction of the cost per line. …[Continue Reading] [...]
December 11th, 2008 at 1:35 am
How could we verify the effectiveness of such a possibility?