Entries Tagged 'Insurance' ↓

Some people in politics want everything to be black and white. “Big government bad, small government good” and similar slogans have become rallying cries during town hall meetings and elections. Sound bites are convenient ways of getting a message across, but unhelpful when it comes to more complicated issues. On the face of it, we seem on the cusp of slipping back into recession. To try avoid this double dip, the Fed has announced plans to buy $400 billion in long-term Treasury Bonds. It’s trying to drive down longer term interest rates. While the Fed tries action, this September sees Washington politics try inaction (again). This time, the House rejected funding for government through mid-November. If this measure does not pass by September 30, government will shut down. As if we did not need further proof of political dysfunction. . .

Hanging this “business as usual” shingle outside Capitol Hill should not distract us from the day-to-day reality of trying to keep life together in business. Yes, the Fed may be trying to keep longer term interest rates down but, with many banks undercapitalized, there’s little or no money to lend, even to those businesses with good collateral. All growth is having to be funded organically – that’s assuming we have survival under control. That means using every cent of revenue in the most effective manner. Of course, this means deciding what the most effective strategies are. At this point, we should admit a prejudice. We believe small businesses do best when the employees are all positively motivated. Note we said “positively” motivated. This is not fear of unemployment. Any boss can bully and try extracting every last ounce of effort out of people. We think staff are more willing to go the extra mile if there’s a mixture of encouragement and trust. One of the ways in which you can lift a burden from an employee’s shoulders is to offer a health plan. With more than 50 million Americans without any health insurance or access to Medicaid, there’s a constant fear of illness in the family. Give some reassurance and you will find the staff are more loyal. Continue reading →

When our grandparents and parents set up their businesses, they relied on pieces of paper and stored the increasingly heavy weight in filing cabinets. This had the virtue of certainty. As long as people were disciplined in labeling each file, everything was easy to find. But, if there was a fire, it was equally easy to lose everything whether to the flames or the water when the fire department used their high-powered hoses. Then along came computers and there were problems as entire blocks of data could just disappear. The paranoid tried to run paper and computer systems side by side and lost all the economic advantages of going digital. Now there’s a new kid on the block. It’s called cloud computing. You could already have your head in the cloud if you run a Gmail account – all your mail and messages are stored by Google.

This trend has been building for the last ten years as more businesses began to outsource some or all their IT problems to bulk suppliers (often overseas). But, in the first instance, this tended to be major processing tasks like the payroll. The difference in today’s services is that you can run applications online and in real time on hardware supplied by an independent company. Indeed, it’s not even necessary to know where the hardware is located. There can be a single site or multiple locations depending on the scale of your business and the nature of the applications you want to run. The advantage of this approach is that the applications are almost infinitely scaleable. What starts off small today, can be massive tomorrow without you managing the upgrade.

Ah, the costs. . . If you run your own hardware, you are responsible for every aspect of its maintenance and support. It’s your responsibility to design and develop the software. This can mean major up-front costs when you buy the systems and serious money required for maintenance and support. Moving into the cloud gives you services for a monthly fee. There are already packages for almost all the major business functions available. In the main, these match or exceed the capabilities of the free-standing packages you can buy. Obviously, a tailor-made solution, specifically written for your company will be hard to beat. But when you consider the cost of the bespoke project, it may be more cost-effective to accept fewer individual design preferences in the generic product. The choice all comes down to whether your needs are complex and cannot be met by the cloud applications. Continue reading →