When you decide to form a small- to medium-sized business, the first steps are obvious: think of something people want, get a DBA, hire employees, etc. After you have created the company, then it is time to get to work, right? Not necessarily. In today’s technology age, there are several steps that you should do now.

1) The Business Plan

Developing a business plan is a must, but it doesn’t need to be complex. A few pages outlining your business overview, industry background, product or service, business model, strategy & team provides the foundation of your plan. Having a solid business plan is a requirement to get SBA (Small Business Administration) loans. For guidance, take a look at Score’s business plan template.

2) Raise Capital

It’s not an easy time to raise capital for a new business. Many larger institutions have reduced lending programs for small businesses and venture capital has seen a downturn over the last couple years. The bright spot in local small business lending seems to currently be with local credit unions. Able to more intimately assess risk in their local markets, some credit unions have still been actively underwriting SBA loans.

3) Legal Structure

If you plan on bringing on partners or investors or will be signing contracts, you’ll want to set up a legal structure and incorporate your company. Your main options setting up as Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, or Corporation. Each structure has its advantages & benefits. Services such as LegalZoom provide cost-effective online tools to help guide you through this process.

4) Protect Your Company’s Name

Securing your brand identity is important, and becomes increasingly so as time goes by. The USPTO website has a section for trademarks where one can conduct a search to see if another business has an existing name similar to yours, and if they are in your industry.

5) Establish a Web Presence

Creating a website is essential these days. Your website needs to be much more than a postcard on the web if it’s going to be a lead generation machine. The cost of choosing a domain and hosting your site has come down dramatically over the last few years. Not to be ignored are social media options like Facebook, Twitter and a blog. These can give you a huge boost to your Google visibility.

6) Phone System

The telephone will be the primary means of sales, support and business relations for your new enterprise. Choosing a toll free number (such as 1-800-Widgets) will allow you to take calls from across the country. You’ll want to consider getting a virtual pbx which will provide the power and functionality of a Fortune 500 phone system, but with no hardware to buy or maintain. Even if your company has only one employee, you can also take advantage of multiple extensions. You can create virtual departments, make announcements and route calls from any extension to any number—your home, office, or cell.

7) Create Your Business Identity

Customizing your own letterhead, business cards, and even e-mail signature with your company name and logo helps establish credibility and brand recognition. It also helps spread the word. Once you create a company logo, use it everywhere; on business cards, brochures, letterhead, your website, even in your e-mail signature.

If you do these seven steps before you open for business, it will save you a lot of time in the long run and make your business run smoother from the get-go. And make sure to join us on Facebook, where we are growing our online conversation with our customers. Find out the latest updates, ask questions, learn tips, and stay connected.

Photos by Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake

We take a rather complex term and break it down into its feature components using the example of the Virtual Office.

As we mentioned in a previous post on cloud computing, the term itself is hotly debated and its definitions are segmented. So let’s use the example of how Cloud Computing has allowed for the “Virtual Office.”

Cloud computing, at its core, is the ability for someone to take a service like a business phone system and “rent” its usage to a wide variety of customers . Because it’s cheaper and more resource efficient for a single vendor to offer services this way, it means that the end consumers have to pay far less than traditional, non-cloud based services of a similar nature.

RingCentral Office is a perfect example. Let’s say a 20 employee company is growing and wants to expand in a new location cost effectively – one that will also have remote satellite offices where employees will work from home.

Traditionally, this would mean that this company has to:

1. Order a new punch-key PBX (phone system) from a traditional hardware vendor who would charge about $1,000 per phone/desk.
2. Call the local telecommunications company to install a T1 line which contains 24 working phone lines. While the cost of this T1 could range from $300 to $700 per month, the real pain is the installation time.
3. After the hardware has been configured and installed, the same vendor that sold the phone system offers training to the company employees (for additional training fees).
4. After the phone system is bought, the T1 lines from the phone company have been installed and the employees trained on the new phone system, then it’s time for the remote offices and on-the-road sales staff to “integrate” into the new office phone system. And how do they do that? By learning how to forward phone calls on their new office desk phones, of course!
5. Any new moves, adds, or changes (known as MACs) to the phone system often require that the vendor who initially sold the phone system come out (referred to in the industry as “the white van”) and make the changes to the phone system itself.

If this company subscribed to a Business Phone System that runs “in the cloud”, the benefits are compelling:

1. Since the hardware & software that controls a business-class phone system is now delivered over the Internet as a service, this company gets fully-configured VoIP phones delivered without having to buy anything else. The only left to do is connect the phones to the Internet.
2. Since the VoIP phones also have a web interface that controls the phone and call-flow, there’s no training of employees on the new phone system required. It’s very easy to master a VoIP phone. One can even take an interactive demo to see just how easy it is.
3. These Business Phone Systems can be added to your smartphones as well. Remote office workers and road warriors can now truly “integrate” with their office desk phones. Apps like RingCentral Mobile for iPhone can be downloaded and set to show the business Caller ID, even from a personal phone.

Now that’s a simple example of how cloud computing is allowing the virtual office to be “virtual.” Because with cloud computing for business phone systems, every phone whether it’s in the headquarters or living on a smart-phone are all virtual phone systems.

The revolution has begun!

RingCentral’s iPhone application lets you dial, fax, and voicemail like you’re in the office

A friend of mine who works for a venture capitalist firm in Palo Alto once noticed my iPhone at lunch and said, “the iPhone is nice, and I love iTunes, but I can’t use it because it’s not ready for business.” At the time, he was right. Though an incredible entertainment and communications device, the iPhone lacked certain enterprise features such as business-class e-mail and the ability to integrate to an existing business phone system or PBX. And faxes? Forget it – I’m not nearly patient enough to wait for my 3G connection to load one of my incoming faxes through a traditional web-client.

As both a writer and user of RingCentral’s virtual PBX service, I’m happy to say that the we recently started using the iPhone app from RingCentral with positive results. It finally uses business-phone functionality that we rely on in our office to send data to my beloved iPhone. What this means is that I can virtually “port” my office desktop phone to my iPhone and make calls as if I was in the office – the office number showing as the Caller ID and all. It also means I can go to Dolores Park on a sunny day in San Francisco and make my customer calls while still “in the office.” Not that I would do that, mind you, but it’s nice to have the option. On a practical level, the two other really useful features are 1.) the ability to send & read faxes from my iPhone screen and 2.) being able to retrieve my office voicemail visually. Both features combined probably save me about 5 minutes a day, and at 240 working days a year – that’s 20 hours per year! Thanks to the RingCentral engineers – I can now enjoy both guilt-free iTunes and almost 3 more days a year that I can spend doing more useful things – like surfing the web. In Dolores Park. On my iPhone. Not that I would do that.

1) Understanding taxes and surcharges on your bill make that calculus test you failed in 12th grade look easy.

Sometimes, I look at my bills and sigh because I can’t figure out why I am being charged $1.36 for some fee I have never heard of. And the bills are usually 4 pages long. You almost need a code breaker to figure these things out. Makes me think that they are trying to hide something from me.

2) You ask for call center functionality and they give you something called “Centrex“.

Centrex is an old PBX technology that was prevalent in the UK in the 1960s and it is still being used albeit not frequently. If someone tries to sell Centrex… run away!

3) Their tech support doesn’t answer calls at night. In fact, they’re not open at night.

Are all of your clients located in your time zone? No? Then why would you want your telecom carrier to only work during your business hours?

4) You ask for new extensions to your office phone system and you wait and wait and wait.

After adjusting your schedule to be available for an appointment with a five-hour window, you have to wait for the technician to arrive. Fingers crossed he doesn’t get stuck in traffic and force a rescheduled appointment on another day

5) You’re still dialing into your office line to retrieve voicemails… I mean, really?

Why are you still calling your office phone to listen to your messages? That is so 1990s and a real pain. You should be able to get your messages from anywhere.

Conclusion

If any of these points ring true for you, then it is time for you to consider a new telecom partner for your business needs.

As a follow up to the ITBusinessedge.com article “Could the Cloud Kill the PBX”, we wanted to offer our input as to where telephony is going and why old-school telephony days are numbered.

This is not meant as a self serving competitive claim but a look at what is now becoming a natural evolution of things in the internet age. Much like the old world method of snail mail is getting decimated by email, it would only seem natural that the physical relays and switches of telephony systems get replaced by the deft coding of a programmer as so many other things are.

As more and more of our life get centralized to the web, this centralization will allow tremendous power in organizing the multiple parts of a business or a person’s life. From a business perspective, a new small business can run their entire back office online. We are not just talking Virtual PBX phone systems but billing, accounting, customer support, project management, meetings and of course mail. Take a service like Zoho and you can see how nearly and entire office can be coordinated and run from one login. And in case you had not noticed, Google is doing a fine job of collecting and potentially controlling huge amounts of data powering a very effective advertising business.

So if the mail, the invoices, the customer addresses, the meetings are all moving online, it is only natural for the phone conversations to move there too. You get to keep them all in one “box” if you will. This was a natural progression as the bandwidth and the price of memory made it a viable option. As the technologies of voice recognition evolve, the use and necessity of having the verbal communication digitized increases to where you could run a Google like search of a phone conversation with little ease (if I were a conspiracy theorist, that’s quite scary).

So it would seem the old school phone line is a little individuated for our needs. It served us well but it’s time is coming to an end.

Photo credit Dominics pics