The Cure For The Holiday Hangover: Get Busy!
At the end of each year many business coaches and self-development gurus encourage entrepreneurs to do an assessment of how their business fared that year. Did they reach their revenue goals? Did they control their expenses? Did they keep their promises to their clients?
But, really… during the holidays, who has the time? For the home based business owner the holidays are usually the time of year when it is toughest to separate your business life from your personal life. With visiting relatives, children off from school or daycare and all the social engagements that must be kept it's amazing if we get any work done at all – let alone do things like assessments and goals review.
This is why I prefer to do such things the first week of the year. There is something about the optimism of the new year that makes the sins and foibles of the previous year somehow easier to take. Since the topic of this blog is telecommunications, here are a few items I suggest you check out that may have had a big impact in your communications expenses:
- Check your cell phone plan – Take a look at your cell phone bill. Actually, it is usually best to look at 3 consecutive months since usage can vary greatly from one month to the next. Compare your usage to your included plan minutes. Are you consistently over? Consistently under? Many people assume that when they sign a term contract with the cell provider they are stuck with whatever plan they signed up for. With most carriers that is not typically the case. You can usually upgrade or downgrade your plan without a penalty. If you are consistently going over plan, it might be worth it for you to upgrade to the next level up. Overage minutes tend to be outrageously expensive. The same holds true if you are significantly under plan every month – could you maybe downgrade your plan and save some money?
- Check your home/business line bill – Do you really use all those features you are paying for? Do you need that second line for your business or could you get away with using a virtual pbx plus your home line?
- Check your long distance usage – Are you paying more per minute than you should for long distance calls? How do you know if the rate you are paying is the best out there? Easy. You use one of the many calculators available on the internet. With bill in hand, plug in the number of minutes and the dollar amount and these calculators will calculate how much you are paying and if there are plans out there that could save you money. I use one by Cognigen. Click here to access it: Best Rate Calculator. It is my affiliate link so share the love if you feel so moved.
- For heavy Long Distance Users – Although I've had a love/hate relationship with voip solutions, you can't beat their unlimited plans. There are two things you should do before you look into subscribing to a VOIP service. The first one is to test your broadband connection to make sure your speed can support voip calls. There are many speed checkers out there. I use MySpeed PC VOIP. It's a downloadable application. There are web based ones available out there as well. The second thing you should do is read as many user reviews as you can for the companies you are considering. A couple of really good review sites are VoipReview.org and WhichVoip.Com. If a company continually gets bad reviews from users take heed. If you don't have the right broadband speed or don't want to use Voip, check with your local phone line provider to see if they offer and unlimited LD plan. Most do.
Of course, if you are too busy or would rather not deal with all these details sign up for a Phone Image Makeover and I will make sure you are not paying too much for your telecom services. Click here to request more information about the makeover. Hope you have an amazing 2008!
