Business and Technology

• Would you like to improve your communication and public speaking skills?
• Worried about your next big presentation?
• How confident are you?

 Do butterflies attack your stomach whenever your asked to speak before a group? Can you confidentally express your thoughts and ideas? Do you have the nerve to ask your boss for a raise? People who get ahead in life are those that who can communicate effectively. Wouldn’t you like to develop this priceless skill? Now you can!

These are some excerpts from some of the Toastmasters promotional material. I have been a member of Sunrisers Toastmasters in Nanaimo for about 1.5 years and can easily say that all of the above is true. Being in sales I have done many presentations over the years. I always thought I did a fairly good job at them prior to joining Toastmasters. I now know my presentations and public speaking skills have improved many many times over. When I started I used to say “umm” and “ahhh” a lot and never realized it. I now can easily get through a speech or presentation with ever saying “umm” or “ahhh” once. There are many other improvements I have noticed. I’ll update you with more on a future post.

If you are in the Nanaimo area and want to know more about Toastmasters and what is can do for you please visit our club web site at Sunrisers Toastmasters or visit the new web site dedicated to all the clubs in Nanaimo, Nanaimo Toastmasters (www.nanaimotoastmasters.info) 

I’ve always disliked inkjet printers, mostly because they are so expensive to run. Unless you really need to do a lot of color printing I suggest stay away from them.
Here is an interesting something very interesting about inkjet printers that I never knew.
I suggest to buy a cheap monochrome laser printer. You’ll get your money’s worth.  

I entered another speech Toastmasters speech contest a couple of weeks ago with my speech entitled “Whatever Happened to the Future?”. Yesterday I won the area contest and competed in the Division contest this weekend.

The City of Nanaimo is one of the first Cities in Canada to adopt this type of Emergency Notification System. If there is an emergency or an event that requires immediate public notification the system will simultaneously call thousands of phone numbers and play a notification message when the phone is answered by a live person or it will leave a message. You must first register for service on the City web site.

At this point they are still trying to increase the number of people signing up for the service as registrations have not been as quick as they hoped. I guess that people won’t see the value of a service like this until they need it. I would also assume that once it is used in an emergency situation those that did not sign up will be quickly flocking to the web site to sign up.

If you live in Nanaimo I suggest you take 2 minutes to sign up for the service.

If you are a City that is interested in learning more about this type of service , you can call us at 1-888-227-9213.

We just updated our website with a new product called Irgent. Would your community benefit from a system like this? Watch the video here.

This could save many lives in your city or town. Personally I would love to be contacted if a dangerous situation arises that may concern me or if there is any way I could be of help to others in a difficult situation.

Are you an entrepreneur? Do you have a compelling business plan? Do you need expansion capital or influential connections? Or savvy advice?

I recently had the opportunity to hear Christine Comaford-Lynch talk at a seminar. If you’re not sure who Christine is let me give you the quick bio.

Christine Comaford-Lynch is a five-time CEO and company founder—and all five businesses grew to be either acquired or taken public. She has 20 years’ experience in operational high-tech positions with Microsoft, Lotus, Adobe, and Apple. She has assisted 700 of the Fortune 1,000 companies and 300 small businesses in accelerating innovation, and has consulted with the Clinton and Bush Administrations on tech and small business strategies.

Christine puts on an outstanding presentation and she really knows her stuff. If you own your own business or you’re thinking of starting your own business this is where Christine can help. She explains everything in a very simple clear to understand language.

Christine is releasing a book called “Rules For Renegades” in September, but you can get your order in for the book early along with a couple of extra perks by going to her website. I’ve ordered the book and had a chance to read chapter 1 already has a prerelease. Check out the Rules for Renegades website for more information about Christine.

There’s still a lot of businesses that rely on fax. The great thing about using a desktop fax service is that it can decrease operational costs associated with in-house fax systems or dedicated fax lines. It’s also easy to scale up or down your fax lines and meet and comply with security requirements.

If any of you are familiar with administering an in-house fax server you’ll know that it can be a big pain, not to mention costly.

Hmmm… Okay let’s talk some more about the benefits of using a hosted solution, because really there are a lot of them.

No Capital Outlay — With no additional hardware to acquire, capital expenditures are reduced and depreciation schedules eliminated. The risks associated with installing 3rd party software on your network are eliminated as well.

Utilization of Existing Infrastructure – Because outsourced fax services leverage existing email client and infrastructure, getting started is quick and seamless. Another great benefit of an outsourced solution is that you don’t have to hire or train additional staff to run the system.

Scalable and Flexible – With a hosted solution, companies are not constrained by their number of outbound telephone lines or system capacity. Hosted solutions are designed to be highly scalable to handle either rapid growth or reduced volume, based on market trends and patterns.

Self-Administering – The outsourced fax provider performs any required system maintenance and monitoring, upgrading and adding new features as they become available, freeing up your IT resources to focus on your core business.

How Desktop Works

Desktop users can send, receive, save, forward and track electronic faxes in seconds − right from their desktops. Documents no longer sit on the fax machine for everyone to see, and you’ll never experience the frustration of missing another important document because the fax number is busy. Work is accomplished faster, with total reliability and added security.

Desktop Fax allows you to turn your desktop into a document handling center for all inbound faxes. Receiving faxes as attachments means you can treat paper documents like electronic files – by viewing, printing, forwarding or deleting them. Additionally, you can rename the file and save it to your computer for easy document storage. Tracking inbound and outbound faxes can be next to impossible with traditional fax machines. However, Fax2Mail gives you complete control of all your e-fax and email documents via online administration tools. Using our secure SSL Web interface, you can control user registration, edit account profiles, and customize settings and options such as coversheet/email design, billing and delivery reports. And you can choose your own local or toll-free fax numbers.

How much does it cost? Desktop fax can cost you less than $10/month. You get your own private fax number and up to 300 fax pages for that price.

Oh… Did I mention that your faxes come to you in either a adobe acrobat .pdf file or a .tif file. Nice!

Here’s a great way to improve the efficiency of a Voice Broadcast by using our Hot Key Transfer feature. Here’s how it works. When the recipient is listening to the message you sent, they would have the option of pressing a key on the keypad of their phone, for example the “0″ (zero) key to get transferred to a live operator.

The last part of your message might go something like this…
“For more information on our products and services, or to purchase this now press the “0″ (zero) key on your keypad and you’ll be transferred to a live operator”

When the recipient presses the “0″ key our system automatically transfers the call to any number that you had set up in the system. The live operator answers the call and takes the order or provides the original recipient with any information that they require.

This commonly works well with verticals such as Collection Agencies, season-ticket renewals, membership renewals, appointment reminders or many other types of products or services were a live person would help to close the sale.

Some of the most common questions I usually get on this are;

Q: What if all the calls come at once and we can’t handle the load?

A: The Message Impact Voice Broadcast service has the ability to do call pacing. This allows you to pace the number of inbound transfers to the live operator or pace the number of outbound calls throughout the day, week, etc..

Q: I don’t have enough (or any) staff to answer the phone?

A: Consider using our Inbound Call Center Services. We will always have operators standing by to answer the inbound calls. It’s easy to add additional operators or remove them based on your inbound call requirements or to match any specific short-term campaigns that you initiate.

If you’re not sure if something like this would work for your type of business, please give us a call and we can discuss what might work best for you and your business. Even if you’d like to test something like this, the costs associated with the setup of a voice broadcast combined with the call center services are very reasonable, it’s very quick to set up, modify or take down again. No need to hire additional staffing for this kind of thing, let us do it for you.

We have posted a new grid on our web site that will hopefully make it easier for you to choose a web conferencing service. The grid outlines all the different services that we have to offer. Keep checking back as we will be continually updating the grid.

Did I miss anything? Please let me know if it’s been helpful for you or call me if you still need some clarity.

You can find it here.