One of the main benefits we always stress about OnlineOffice and on-demand software in general is how environmentally friendly it is. There was an excellent article recently at Software Advice where they conducted some tests to see if a SaaS solution would really have much effect on the amount of energy consumed. They used a medical practice for the purpose of this test and compared traditional record-keeping software stored on a local server with a cloud computing alternative hosted at a data centre. 

The result was an impressive 93% reduction in overall energy consumption for a four physician practice – and that was before they had even factored in the energy savings that can be achieved through telecommuting, using low-powered basic computers and being free of packaging or bulky instruction manuals. 

WinWeb takes climate change seriously so we actually go one step further than this with our Climatebyte technology. OnlineOffice is completely carbon neutral because we plant trees when we need to deploy new servers. 

I had an interesting conversation about my view that management control over employees is a myth. I have believed for some time now that an office is often a total waste of money and completely unnecessary. Most of the time I’m told it’s OK when you work by yourself, but not if you have employees, as they need to be supervised and somehow “controlled”.

I have now been working for almost ten years from home, and most of my staff works from home too. Apart from being an eco-friendly way to work, it saves people time and frustration to travel in and around London to come to an office, where we all sit in cubicles or offices. In the days of broadband internet, Skype and OnlineOffice, there is no need for an office, even to have meetings.

Offices, like cars are are often nothing else but status symbols – what other reason can there be for a small business to have an office? If that is true then how is the office helping with your business, it’s a big expense. Seriously, if you do not have clients coming thru your office doors several times every day, why have the office. Even if you have, do really all your people need to be in the office every day? I guess not!

We are in an economic downturn, what is more important – your ego or your business – ask yourself that every time you walk into your office. I’m sure there a good reasons for some micro businesses to have offices, even so I currently can’t think of any, but I’m convinced in most cases a healthy bootstrapping and outsourcing mentality would be more beneficial for your business.

Unless the first business goal is to feed your egomania, you need to have a good hard look at your cost structure to survive in these times. — ST.

As part of our OnlineOffice we offer web-services like web-hosting, email, online shop, online file-store and a wordpress blog. Blogging is most certainly the most inexpensive and direct way to communicate with possible customers, you can

• blog about your products and services; explain certain aspects better;
• blog about your company and your business mission;
• blog about your industry, comment on development and differentiate yourself;
• blog about case studies to do with your product and services.

In other words communicate with others on the internet and market your small business. There are many hosted services out there, which are more or less easy to use. Our approach has been to make the blog a plug-in to the basic web site you can setup without any IT skills. With our free 24/7 live support we can help with any issues, should you have any. problems.

For me blogging is a bootstrapper technique to attract new business without having to spend any more money. In the mid-ninties I used to tell people to get a web-site, today a web-site should be standard for any small business and a blog a must if you want to succeed in the future. You may believe that blogging is all about attracting global audiences, when in reality you can use blogging for very local markets, too. It certainly beats sending out leaflets and it is better for the environment.

If you have a story to tell, tell it – nobody else is going to do it for you. ST.

I’m sure you have some expertise in a special (niche) field, it could be something to do with your training and education, or a hobby you really enjoy.

You can make money with this niche knowledge, and the boorstrapper blog has a post today on how to do that. Raj has posted a great list with an easy step-by step guide on how to build your authority and it centers around setting up a website and blog, nothing could be easier, even if you are not a tech. geek. This type of small business venture is extremely ego-friendly too.

I find this kind of entrepreneurship especially useful for parents at home. Just think about the number of highly skilled moms and dads at home enjoying parenthood, but wishing at the same time they could stay on top of their professional game. This is a fun, flexible way to stay involved and great for any CV should you ever want to go back to work for someone else – although I doubt that very much.

Long before you make it into the top 100 blogs of just about anything, you will find people willing to pay you money for ads, white papers, speaking at events, invite you to product launches, etc. – you will be an authority in your field, it’s just a question of time and passion.

You do not necessarily have to be that good at writing itself (look at me!), use a spell-checker – but be passionate about your topic and people will read your blog and respond. It is the a great feeling to communicate with your readers world-wide.

One final point, blogs are being sold like hot-cakes for serious amounts of money these days, do not under estimate the selling potential of a venture like this!

So just one question then – what are you an Authority in – tell me, I will read it? Setup and running cost for this, $20/£10 per month. ST.

As you may remember I was part of the Blog Action Day for our Environment and I keep on finding great little posts about eco-friendly issues relating to small business, including home business – my personal favorite.

Tony Clark writes a blog about working from home from his home-nest called “Success from the Nest” and has tips how to save energy in your home based business:

“As a home-base entrepreneur, you have the unique opportunity to have a small impact on the environment, all while having a big impact on the world.

Just another good reason to give it a go…”

I think he is right, and remember all the green/eco-friendly benefits of working online for the environment and also for yourself. ST.

On October 15th I posted three posts for Blog Action Day For Our Environment and I was in very good company, the statistics are impressive:

• 20,603 blogs participated
• 23,327 posts where published
• 14,631,038 RSS readers alone

The reach of the postings is likely a multiple of the 14 Million readers via RSS, since most will have been read on the blog sites. My contributions for that day where:

• Blog Action Day For Our Environment: WinWeb Pledge
• The World Without US
• Slow Progress With Eco-Friendliness in Our Daily Lives

Next year there will be another Blog Action Day, so why not get involved? ST.

As my last article on Global Warming today, due to my commitment to the Blog Action Day For Our Environment, I would like to write about a couple of personal experiences that make you wonder what some people, companies and paper pushers think.

First up, John Lewis our local department store. My wife went to buy some new shoes, found a nice pair (You didn’t expect me to say anything else now, did you?), but did not want to take the shoe-box. The sales assistant lady argued with her about not taking the box, so my wife said she would not take the shoes, if she had to take the box.

At that point the sales assistant realised, that my wife was serious and she may lose the sale, so she wrote on the till-receipt, that my wife could not bring the shoes back – which is her statuary right as a consumer – because she had refused to take the box.

Packaging is a major contributor to our environmental problem, consumers get penalized for not wanting packaging. We need a serious change in attitude and the way we package our goods.

North Herts District Council, has their “own way” of dealing with packaging, they just won’t pick it up anymore. We have just been told with two weeks notice that they will only collect our normal waste once every two weeks. So rather than working at the source of the problem, they just penalize the consumers.

Apart from creating some serious public health risks they have completely abdicated their responsibility towards the public, by introducing these measures without proper information and in my mind consultation. This type of policy has created a “fly-tipping” nightmare in our neighborhood, and it is getting worse by the week.

If we do not stop, just going for the “weakest link” in this chain, the consumer, we will further delay coming to sensible solutions for our environmental problem For the time being that seems to be the current way forward, for this government without own vision and the local councils. ST.

I would like to recommend a book to you on this Blog Action Day For Our Environment. The book:

The World Without Us written by Alan Weisman (ISBN 978-1-905264-03-2).

It is not immediately obvious that this book is about our climate, it offers a fascinating glimpse of what would happen to the earth if humans vanished today, forever. Most importantly, would our planet ever fully recover? Bill McKibben, author of the End of Nature called it:

“… This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, …..”

He is right, I understand now that to really heal the wounds, we as humans have inflicted on this planet, we must cut our world population in half. This is a stark reality to open your eyes to, but it is a also the only way. We have the choice to do it ourselves or have our plant do it for us, in a very unpleasant way.

We can reduce our impact immediately, and we can heal our planet in the next 100 year. ST.

In August I signed up for the Blog Action Day for our Environment, and today is the day. So I’ll be posting some articles about the environment. First up, what WinWeb will do to minimise the effects of small business on the environment.

In June of this year, I decided to think about ways to make our own company carbon neutral. I started discussing the concept in my company and we developed what we call ClimateByte Technology by WinWeb.

We were determent to take our vision, of becoming carbon neutral, to our clients and get them involved. So in August after signing up to this blog action day, we made the following pledge:

WinWeb pledges to plant one tree every year for each paying customer that signs up to our subscription service via the WinWeb website and remains a customer for longer than one year – this will reduce your carbon footprint and make your home-office or office workstation more than carbon neutral. We make this pledge initially up to the end of 2008. Each tree will reduce your carbon footprint by about 730kg CO2 – and that is just the start of it!

This is only one of ten ways by which we help small business to become carbon neutral and more eco-friendly, you can read the other nine points here.

We realise that the success of saving our environment for us and our children, starts with the choices we make everyday, however small. ST.

A few days ago I was once again reminded by Joshua Levy and his piece “One Blogger Asks: Is the Grass Really Greener on the Web Worker’s Lawn?” on his blog Web Worker Daily that I wanted to write a piece about what I believe to be the social impact of home working.

Joshua is asking some interesting questions about working from home:

So is all of this freedom actually liberating us? Does web work actually represent an evolution in the working conditions of the masses? Or are we fooling ourselves, blind to the reality that we can’t have it two ways — you can’t have the freedom AND have someone else, er, pay the bills.

If I ask myself these and other questions I’m invariably drawn to find answers in my personal work life and how it has changed in the last decade.

In 1999 I was still office based, traveled from one of our offices around the world to the next and was rarely home. In fact most of the time those years I came home Friday very late or Saturday and then often left Sunday night again. So I saw little of my family and especially my son who is now grown-up and ready to go to university.

Then in 1999 I sold my ISP-business and went back to run WinWeb. This time around I worked from home, right from the start I did not want to be in an office and lead the same life as before. So for the past eight years I have been there when my son came home from school, I even picked him up often enough. I was here when he came home with the latest music CD, I had to listen to – not always easy, I admit – or the latest sport-shoes form addidas had finally arrived at the shops.

Similarly I spend much more time with my wife, going for lunch, doing some “essential” gardening – I hated gardening, but love it now. I could give you many more examples, but you get the picture.

While there are many challenges for home workers, I believe we are seeing the beginning of an “reversal” trend. I would like to list here some challenges I believe our society is facing currently:

• Child care – in our work dominated society we often outsource most of our child-care, in kindergarten, boarding schools, and other institutions, here our children will not receive the same level of care and love they deserve and need;
• Care for the Elderly – our lifestyles often separate us from our loved ones and in times of need we are often not able to care for our relatives or friends, because we live in different cities or even countries for example;
• Environment – many of us spend hours every day alone in cars or on trains – not alone, but still isolated – and contribute to the carbon emissions that change our climate.

There are many more examples. This whole process began with the “Industrial Revolution” some 150 years ago. Some of us may even remember a time when three or even four generations of a family lived in one house. People worked in their villages, child-care or care for family “just” happened – was that a bad or good thing? Looking at single parent families and the impact on our children, I would argue it was a good thing, and so would the many parents working from home exactly for that reason – to provide a healthy family environment for their loved ones.

I believe that the whole trend of home working may in the future allow us to have a much more natural work/life balance and will reverse some of the damaging effects of the post industrial revolution changes in our society. People will live closer to family, local communities will be revived – I believe that is happening as we speak, and our children will benefit from “more family”, and all this will have a profound impact on all our lives and the environment.

I would encourage Joshua and everyone else working from home to relearn the social skills of building local friendships, or live near family and give you the social life you need.

After all, this technology we at WinWeb and others supply makes it possible to work from anywhere, gives you a tremendous amount of freedom to live the life you want, where you want.

Let’s hope in hundred years from now people will see this era not only as the “Information Age”, but also the age when we learned to live a better work/life balance, in tune with our emotional and social needs as individuals, families and society as a whole. What do you think?

Have a great weekend with your family and friends.