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

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.

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

With the economy as uncertain as it is, everyone is looking for ways to cut spending and improve their bottom line. Diane Meyers, directing analyst for Infonetics Research, has found that one way companies are cutting costs is by turning to VOIP and virtual PBX for their business communications:

Demand for residential and business VoIP services continues to grow through the economic downturn because of the cost savings they provide. As a result, in 2008 the VoIP services market had healthy growth of 33% to $30.8 billion.

This is a trend even small businesses can get on. An online PBX is cheaper than a traditional PBX. Because it is maintained by your service provider and allows you to adjust it via a web site, you don’t need to hire an IT guru to manage it. And because it a virtual PBX doesn’t require any hardware being installed at your facility, it doesn’t matter that your vast entrepreneurial empire is currently limited to the spare room over the garage.

If you have a team of like-minded individuals helping you build your business, a hosted phone system can be even more useful, since it allows customer calls to be routed to any member of your team no matter where they are. So if calls need to go to your programmer in Seattle, your marketing genius in New York, and still reach you at the coffee shop down the street, a VOIP system can route them as if you were all in the same building.

Finally, your internet phone service is maintained by your provider. Upgrades and improvements happen transparently, without you needing to lift a finger. This means your communications stay up to date, no matter what new technologies or tools pop up in the future.

Photo credits: Apreche, pasotraspaso