Optimizing expenditure on web-related services

The Internet is the cheapest place to put information and marketing materials about your products and services. Considering using the Internet, you'll save money and resources printing brochures, flyers, getting a space to display your wares or putting up banners in public places. And the basic function to do so is to put up a website.

For this article, we briefly examine a couple of hosting and email services which are FREE for users without much web based needs. What are the assumptions made?
1) you do not need a lot of space on the web: you only need a web space to display your products and services
2) you do not have secure transactions on the web: no monetary transaction is needed on your website
3) you have less than ten employees or if you do not need more than 10 email accounts for the business operations
4) you're just starting out and have a budget to meet.

Instead of doing a comparison of the endless web hosting services, we'll zoom into just weebly.com
Basically Weebly has a few plans (or tiers) of hosting packages available. What's attractive is its Free plan (which can be free for life). The downside is you'll have a weebly.com domain. But with the right SEO this shouldn't be an issue.

Superb Website Builders has done a pretty clear cut comparison of Weebly and a similar service provider, Squarespace. You can read more about it in the link below.
Comparison between Weebly and Squarespace

About emails, this article discusses about Zoho Mail. Their Free (and it's ad-free) plan covers 10 users and a reasonable amount of space.

Usually these hosting services cost between US$30 to US$60 per year, and you probably don't use more than a GB of space. The savings can be significant if you're starting out small!

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Entrepreneurship and being positive

I came across a Facebook post today and it's a collection of charts and graphics from Funders and Founders. Brings up my mood after looking at these charts.

Basically, you're not done until you give up. That's what entrepreneurship is about! #bePositive

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Banking Services for Start ups

Banking services is probably one of the most irritating essential services you need when starting up a business. Unless you're a freelancer, salesperson or simply an entrepreneur, you'll likely appreciate having a merchant front to account for your business spendings and avoid checks.

If you're on a low budget and do not require a lot of services, Pay pal probably works the best. However there are low cost/ free bank services for the entrepreneurs. Some are listed here.

Standard Chartered Business $aver Current Account
There isn't much written about this on the website, except that cheque books are free with this account. If it's the rest of the account fees are the same as the previous SME banking account product, then there shouldn't be any fall below fee charges. Still, best to call the bank up directly for a chit-chat session.

Since the interest rates are high, this account is probably the best if you have high liquidity.

DBS Entrepreneur's Account
Most of the fees are waived for six months, do note the minimum monthly average balance (MMAB) is S$10,000 for DBS's Business Account.

OCBC Business Banking
This account sells on the ease of transactions with customers, i.e. offers a variety of payment options for you to collect money from your customers. It's also clearer on its bank charges.

However, there is also a monthly account charge of S$35 and a fall below fee of S$35 (MMAB is S$5,000). If your business has constant cashflow this account is probably the best option.

Maybank FlexiBiz Account
No MMAB, and similar interest rates as Standard Charted Business $aver. Charges 50cents per cheque signed though.

Banks do change their policies and product features regularly. While we make the effort to keep the information up-to-date, please call the banks for a one-on-one discussion to see if they meet your needs!

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Why Outsourcing?

1. Cost Savings

When the activity is your not core business and outsourcing it gives significant lower operational and labour savings. This will also allow additional bandwidth to focus on your core business processes.

2. Leverage on outsourcing vendor

Outsourcing allows your company to tap onto your outsourcing vendor resources and networks. The vendor can also provide you with links into a new market.

3. Mitigate Risk

Outsourcing allows the company to mitigate risk in a number of ways. Firstly, outsourcing passes the responsibilities of delivering onto your vendor, and is especially useful when your company is not adept in the particular area. Secondly, locating part of their operations overseas is useful especially when the country where you are operating in has high risk. 

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Pros and Cons of Patenting your product

A case sparked much debate over the need for a patent at work today.

Pros

- Protection - it helps to prevent to a certain extent competitors from copying your innovation

- Asset - gives your product credibility, as a patented product will more likely  give a wow effect to the consumer 

Cons

- Application costs - much money and specialized skill required, as a result, inventors are usually unwilling to fork out additional resources especially in tight situations

- Possibility of failure and thus a waste of money

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How to make your business scalable and some examples

The key thing to look in the potential if the business is it's scalability. It may be losing money, it may be stagnant currently, but if it is able to grow it's capacity while  decreasing the incremental cost securing and supporting a new client, it's scalable. And being a scalable model adds value to your business.

How to make your business scalable (PPPC)

Product

try to standardize your production and keep to a standard product. Think apple. They have only one product the iPhone, and you can observe similar parts used across their Span of products. This gives them the advantage to be able to produce morevolume for less amount.

People

 if the business depends on a star player and cannot survive without him,  naturally it is harder to scale. To expand operations, we need to break away from exclusive skills held by few to pervasive knowledge such that more people can run the show, increasing the capacity to grow. To achieve this, some sort of training program or knowledge- sharing sessions should be in place.

Processes

Operations and processes should be kept as simple as possible. They should also be standardized as far as possible. In that way, expanding the company would be mostly repetition of the same thing and can tap on existing infrastructure for support. Identify suitable areas of the business which can be outsourced, transforming your fixed cost into variable cost.

Customers

Leverage on your customers to reduce resources on certain tasks. Some process need not human intervention and can be passively accomplished. For example, instead of getting a staff to take their orders, use a computer/ self-service kiosk for the customers to input their orders.

What are some examples of scalable business?

- a grocery store. Below the maximum capacity,  You can restock and extend your operating hours to increase sales. This does not require a large additional capital investment.

- selling your licensed software is scalable. You can sell as many copies of your software once developed and the cost to support the customer should not be more than the cost of goods. Successful SaaS(software as a service) models is able to easily scale their operations and expand their client base to all over the world.

- remember the overnight sensation drawing app "draw something"? That is also an example of a scalable business as they built something that was efficient, fast and easy to scale. They had the capacity to accommodate 50 million downloads - the processes were kept up and running throughout.

Thus, the potential of being able to garner millions of customers is very attractive to investors. To fully maximize the value of your business, refine your model such that it is easier to scale up.

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SaaS businesses - Margins are tight

Some key takeaways of SaaS business that you should know-

1)      There are economies of scale – so size matters

2)      Important to fuel growth – which means  big spending on marketing and sales

3)      COGs are higher because of service costs

4)      Capital Intensive to create and grow

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3 tips when using acronyms in business

Woah careful with your acronyms! If you work in a place where the culture enjoys coining new acronyms, you have to understand that people might not get them. A good point of reference would be checking with your newcomers to see what they think the acronym is without giving the context. In fact, acronyms are sometimes a pain to remember but, they do help save time in some cases. When using acronyms, some things to consider:

1) Will the reader understand out of context

It will be frustrating for the reader or worse, if he wrongly assumes some other meaning for the acronym

2) Is the acronym appropriate

Be especially careful with acronyms containing the F word..

3) is the acronym widely known in other context

Avoid coining new acronyms with already popular ones to prevent confusion. Acronyms like AIDS , FAQ are well known for the purposes they serve

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