Vertigo / Group

Streamline Your Business Systems

Over the last few months I have been looking to streamline my business to the absolute necessities. I set out to accomplish two primary goals: (1) reduce expenses and (2) reduce administrative overhead, both constraints must be accomplished or I will not proceed with a given process redesign. My lofty goal; operate on a budget for less than $500 a month and free-up time.

In the consulting business there is really only a handful of tools necessary to operate; phones, internet, email, website, business software, and some specialized pieces of software required for ones vertical market.

I have accomplished my goal of getting costs down to $500 a month by utilizing the following pieces of software:

For phones, I moved to both Speakeasy VoIP and Google Voice.

For website and email I moved from my internal servers to Media Temple hosting. This allowed me to attain greater uptime and removed the need for static IP addresses with my ISP.

For Internet access at my home office, I moved from a business FiOS account to a residential FiOS account. The change reduced my costs by 50% and increased my upload and download speeds by 24%.

For business software, I utilize a combination of Dropbox, Evernote, Basecamp, Campfire, Highrise, Backpack, and Logmein.

I do use some specialized software such as iWorks, Aperture, FCE, LE, CS5, etc…

In short, I have substantially reduced costs and increased my available time so that I can focus on what matters, service existing clients and generating new business.

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