Lower Risk When Expanding Business
April 5, 2011
Recently I decided to expand both my customer service platform and the marketing efforts with one main goal in mind to increase our customer service, and as a secondary goal, to create more future business which would lead to higher profits. In today’s economic climate I am still unsure about expanding my business with long-term fixed costs. I have been left several times with unused office space and cubical full of equipment and phones set up for previous contracts that are now canceled. One way of expanding while minimizing exposure, is to eliminate certain expenses traditionally associated with growth that in effect reduce risk and help bolster gross margins. After researching my options about standard office expansion and investing in the phones and computers necessary to complete the infrastructure for that expansion, I decided to fall back on an old business model that I use to use years ago with a little twist. Back in early 1990 I started developing the executive office concept for specific businesses, attorneys, realtors, and doctors. Technology was not what it was today but we had common access to phones, voice mail, internet, fax, and collaboration networking which was my biggest selling point at the time. With technology today we realized we could take that one step further and create a similar collaboration using the home office environment. In the early stages of this, as we were developing the idea, I had my IT expert go to CompUSA and purchased the parts to build a phone server, very simple and inexpensive. He researched the different option landing on free VOIP software program called Elastix. After the necessary configurations, we purchased inexpensive SNOM 360 phones, using IAX Extensions (used for enabling VoIP connections between servers) along with long distance through BinFone a telecom company. Now our new customer service, developers, and sales people are working from home with a multi-line business phone by their side. Each has an “inner office extension” just like as if they were at a physical office, we can transfer calls and voice mails just like we are next to we in the same office. My one concern was the ability to keep up that collaboration network you should experience within a traditional office or executive suite environment. I think this collaboration is critical if you want to keep ahead of the curve in business. Today, this connection and be can be, to a degree, maintained through the new social media platforms, as well as, implementing office virtualization, cloud computing, mobility transformation, live video, text chat, and webinars, gives us the ability to support that connection. From the phone system I can check their productivity through the operator panel in both software applications. I can see who is calling who and track expenses and bill so at a reduced cost of my office and overhead. It’s something to consider. We have online shared calendars, secure document sharing and live chat for questions on the fly when direction is needed. Taking this to the next level and developing a much more advanced phone solution we created a company called Curve Networks which offers an entire suite of business services platforms within a Tier-3, Tier-4, SAS-70 ll Certified Data Center. Whether it’s a traditional office, executive suite environment, or home office, we have quality and affordable solutions that are expandable worldwide. If you want to learn more or you have any questions please check us out at www.curvecloud.com and I welcome your reaction. My direct phone number to my desk is 727-388-9795.
