Enhance your business using technology

Note: Our guest blogger today is Jo-Ann Beserra.  She is an independent consultant in Boulder, Colorado. Operating an office is no easy task. Jo-Ann gives you tips on managing your office.

As an educational consultant, the technology options available to enhance my business are numerous. To simplify, I look at my business from two perspectives and keep one key center stone product as home base for each view.

My first perspective is my front office, or the customer view.  The center stone for my front office is my website. A website can be much more than an online brochure. I use my website for marketing campaigns, announcements, blogs or newsletters, and I track who is reading them. I maintain contact with prospective and current clients through my website. I share resources and provide information. My website also links in other tools that I select to use, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

My second perspective is my back office, and the tool I use to run my business, is Mycca, which offers such a large breadth of functions that play nicely with other pieces of technology. Here are the top 7 ways that Mycca integrates other tools:

1.      Scheduled student meetings are added to my personal iCal calendar so I have both my work and personal calendars in one view.

2.      Emails sent to students are stored on the student’s record and can be recorded as a session for payment.

3.      Branded reports are created instantly for print, storage or email. The professional look of these reports is very impressive.

4.      Students can view videos of colleges, which is often their preferred method of research.

5.      Links to other outside college resources such as test registration, reviews, college websites and tools are readily available in the right place.

6.      Special tools for organizing essays and scholarships can be accessed from within Mycca, without separate accounts.

7.      And my very favorite is that MyCCA is accessed from my website, so clients pass through my website and prospects see that I have special tool.  This links my back office to my front office.

 Comment:  See information about different features of mycca.net Jo-Ann mentions on the mycca website under Features.  You can also check in the HELP section for details about these and other features of mycca.

Keeping the Promise of the New Year

Making resolutions is a tradition we all share as a New Year rolls around. Some people hate making resolutions. I embrace them. To me it is acting on the promise the New Year holds. I want to seize the opportunity of a new beginning and make it my own. It gives me a chance to stop, take stock of my past year, and make goals for the next year.  Although this is important to do in my personal life, it is crucial to do in my business life.  As a consultant, I want to work smarter, not harder. I want to be a better educational consultant as well as a better business person. The easy part is always making the goal.  The hard part is making the goal happen.  Here are some tips I have found beneficial in keeping goals.  Use these to guide you as well as you make your new year’s resolutions:

1. Bring Focus to your goals.  Don’t shoot for the moon, trying to set goals for everything you want to do.  Create a focus for your goals for the next year by selecting your top 5 goals or less.
2. Define your goals.  Compare the difference between a goal to “make more money” to “increase my income 10%”.  The first is hard to measure.  The second gives you definition and helps you concentrate your efforts.
3. Make a plan.  There is a saying that a goal is a wish unless it is written down.  Not only write down your goal, but create a plan to make it happen.  Otherwise it will stay a wish for the next year.  A plan helps you to track progress toward your goal.  This is much more motivating to you to achieve the goal.
4. Share your plan.  By sharing your goal with your office, your spouse or someone else, you bring that goal to a level of accountability and support.  Knowing someone else knows and shares your goals will help you maintain your momentum.
5. Celebrate along the way.  As you reach milestones in your plans, celebrate.  Rejoice in the progress. If there are setbacks in the progress, that is ok.  You can celebrate getting back on track too.

Using these tools will help me to make the most of the promise of 2012.  I hope they will help you too!