Want to know how to put more of your revenue in your pocket AND free up time to do the important things for your business? All business owners can save time and money if they properly leverage the Web through Web services. What I am referring to is replacing recurring tasks that take employee time to accomplish with web-based services that do it automatically.

If you are a small business owner, you probably do many day-to-day tasks that take up a lot of your valuable time. Your time is better spent doing the things you’re in business for than regularly completing every little business administration chore. A common complaint I hear among small business owners is that they spend too much of their time on “business” issues like accounting or mailings instead of the “fun stuff” that their expertise is in.

"We're trying to build something lasting." - Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder

"In all of our activities, we take a long-term view." - Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation founder 

Vision, innovation, wisdom and hard work are but four of the skills and techniques Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates employed from the very beginning of their business experience. Both started as small business owners. They didn't have much capital to spare, and neither did they locate their businesses in prized locations. 

Do you write business letters or other business correspondence?
If so, think about how these questions apply to your situation:

If we were e-mailing a personal note to a friend, most of us would use both first-person pronouns and contractions. If we were writing a report to be sent to a senior executive, we might use neither. So the question arises: How do we decide when to use them and when not to?

Any translation company, whether it consists of a single person or has a large translators' staff on the payroll, needs a strict and clear project management procedure to determine the exact work flow for all stages of a job, from the moment the source document is received to the moment the translated file is sent back to the client. The larger a company is, the greater detail is required for each phase description in order to make certain that all team members have a complete and similar understanding of the work scope and purposes.

Unlike a freelancer, a translation company acts bidirectionally: it receives documents from clients and distributes them between freelance subcontractors with the project management and quality control tasks performed in-house. A freelancer, even if he or she is very successful and has an immense number of clients, does not normally receive more work than he or she can handle and therefore does not need to subcontract regularly.

“Our technical team has just changed the spec for the camera slightly so, we need to change a couple of words on the packaging - the changes are quite minor - are we still ok for Friday delivery as we need to go to print over the weekend” ?

BANG! You are off and running!

The following week, you are happily working on this exciting project and your phone rings. It is your great new client...wanting to make a slight change to the project. Hmmm...

Being the wonderful and oh-so-easy-to-work with consultant that you are, you agree, hang up the phone, and get back to work.

One of the first decisions that you will have to make as a business owner is how the company should be structured. This decision will have long-term implications, so consult with an accountant and attorney to help you select the form of ownership that is right for you. In making a choice, you will want to take into account the following:
- Your vision regarding the size and nature of your business.
- The level of control you wish to have.
- The level of structure you are willing to deal with.
- The business' vulnerability to lawsuits.
- Tax implications of the different ownership structures.
- Expected profit (or loss) of the business.
- Whether or not you need to reinvest earnings into the business.
- Your need for access to cash out of the business for yourself.

In one specific case, a client made a presentation at a major industry conference, where her name and company were included in the conference program and promotional literature. During the time since her presentation, she has received as many as twenty calls a day from vendors and her mailbox is full of unsolicited vendor email. A few persistent salespeople call and email her almost every day, even though she has said “NO” to them numerous times. In one particularly unfortunate case, two different salespeople from the same company contacted her repeatedly without knowing that the other person was also calling her. So, she doesn’t answer her phone, she has an impenetrable SPAM filter, and she doesn’t respond to your email. Despite the annoying calls, messages and relentless salespeople, today she has a more serious, but related, problem.