My girlfriend, Vicki, is a legal secretary and we worked together for almost a year right after college. Talking with her today for a bit, she told me that her law firm has been struggling in the recession, like so many other businesses. So, to save money and not have to cut anyone’s pay, their HR person decided to lay off the firm’s receptionist and have each of the legal secretaries take a half day shift to cover the phones and front desk.

I’m aghast. What a dumb idea. That puts a huge burden on all the other secretaries and now they won’t be able to get their own work done. Plus they are paying the legal secretaries a much larger salary than what they were paying the receptionist, so they just made that position cost a whole lot more.

Vicki hates sitting out front and dealing with the phones. The firm is using voip phone service, to save money, which means she has to wear a headset while answering the phones. She doesn’t like wearing a headset and she refuses to share a headset with the other secretaries. She made the firm buy each legal secretary their own headset to wear, as a matter of good hygiene. So there’s another related expense to letting the receptionist go.

Vicki was telling me a little about VOIP and how she was thinking about getting that at home. But the system used by the law firm is Business VOIP, so she would not have to use a headset at home.

One of the non profit organizations that I work with has started an email marketing program for some of their fund raising activities. I think that is a great idea, as most people now have an email address and access to the internet. So sending out emails is a quick way to get a message out to hundreds of people and it is less expensive than having materials printed or photocopied and then sent out by mail.

The only problem with sending out all these emails is that you need good email marketing software to handle the large lists and to provide templates for quick composition.

The last time I sent out emails to a long list of recipients, I had problems with my server flagging the emails as spam and limiting the number of emails that I could send at one time to less than 20. So to send out 2,000 emails, I would have to send the same template out to a list of 20 people 200 times. Let me tell you, that is very repetitive and tiring. Especially when there are email marketing solutions to handle those types of issues for you, faster and easier.

Just about every small business has realized by now that they need to be online and that they need at least a basic web site. Some businesses are still having a hard time figuring out how to make that happen. They have to learn about web hosting, web design, SEO and all the fun things that the professionals do to make a functional, revenue generating, internet presence.

Once they master the basics, then the more advanced options have to be considered. For some businesses, a managed hosting arrangement is an affordable option to hiring engineering staff and housing a full IT department.

If storing a lot of computer equipment on site becomes a problem, a very practical way to free up space and increase security is colocation. By sending your servers to an off-site facility, you no longer have to worry about fire, vandalism, theft, or natural disasters that may affect your primary place of business. The servers and all your data will still be safe and available for use because they are somewhere else.

Today I learned about retargeting and remarketing. All my life I have been in sales and marketing and it just goes to show that no matter how long you have been in an industry or a field of work, you are always learning new things.

Marketing is different from sales and both are different from public relations. Yet they are all related and they all help achieve the same end result. So now there is a new dimension to this trio of business makers and revenue generators. Retargeting companies is the next horizon for my marketing team and the internet experts that we work with to bring in customers from our company web site.

Remarketing means to present an opportunity again. For example, someone comes to your website, then leaves and looks at other web sites. While at another website, they happen to see a banner ad for your company. It looks familiar and maybe even promising. So they click on the ad and go back to your web site. That is the moment that you want to swoop in and close the sale!

When I worked in California, the company’s world headquarters was actually in Australia. That meant that all the top tier management men were Australian – except for my boss. My boss was from Los Angeles and was allowed in because of his high level business connections and deep pockets. He was filthy rich and had a lot of influence with the management team.

The Australian team ran everything related to personnel and benefits through the Human Resources department in Sydney. We had to read through a policy manual that spoke about unfamiliar benefits terms, such as funeral plans. They also have aussie accident cover policies, which we call other names, such as short term disability coverage or major medical.

Eventually we converted a lot of that to American language and more traditional American benefits, such as a term life insurance quote. In fact, after about 6 months on board with them, my boss brought in a couple of venture capitalists and bought the entire company from the Australians.

Years ago, one of my first jobs was working at a regional sales office of an international lumber products company. I worked with all the district slaes managers and had to attend all the sales meetings, which were held all over the country. If the meeting was within a 4 hour drive of Nashville, the people from our office locally would all pile into the boss’s chevy suburban and ride together to the meeting.

At the time, my boyfriend had a jeep commander, so a 4 hour ride in the suburban was much more comfortable than riding in the jeep. But ever time we had a meeting in Atlanta, my boyfriend wanted to go with me and have a mini vacation together. Since I was the only woman in the office, I always got my own private hotel room. So having my boyfriend come to Atlanta meant a free hotel room together and he could go do tourist things while I attended the meetings.

But then he started getting a bad attitude about not being invited to the activities and dinners, and complaining about being left alone too much. I never could make him understand that I was there for work and that I was expected to participate in the activities. He got uglier and uglier about it, so I had to dump him. There’s no place in my life for a jealous and abusive boyfriend.

Now when I travel by car and want a good rife, I drive a cadillac dts. Although a lot of people around here prefer the Lexus and Infiniti as luxury cars, the old school southerners all drive a cadillac. I’m not really old school myself, but I can learn a thing or two from them. I agree that the cadillac is the best riding luxury car and that’s what I’ll drive when comfort counts.

Blog post written by my buddy Tim Boadler.

Getting my masters degree has always been one of my goals. Since I graduated college, I knew that I wanted to go on and get my masters, seeing as no one else in my family had achieved this. Unfortunately, with student loans to pay off, it was virtually impossible for me to start taking graduate classes right after I received my bachelor’s degree. Instead, I got a full time job and started paying down my student debt. I decided last year to look into getting my masters degree through an online program. The first step was to find out how to get hughes internet in New York. Once I did that, I could proceed with my plans. I had minored in finance and knew that I wanted to get masters in accounting. I looked into programs using my satellite internet and decided to go ahead with the process.

The internet has helped me greatly in achieving my goal of getting my masters degree. So far, I have taken courses on cost accounting, auditing, reporting procedures and business information systems. The practices that online courses use are easy to grasp. I was somewhat worried about the level of communication I would have with my instructors, but have been pleasantly surprised to find that communication is open and responses are quick. If it wasn’t for wireless satellite internet, I do not see how I would have been able to go back to school to finish my schooling.

There is a scene in an old movie that caught my attention right away and has stuck with me. Do you remember the movie, “Pretty Woman,” with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts? There are several really good lines in that movie, but one of my all time favorites is when she goes back to Rodeo Drive with him to go shopping. Here is a Youtube clip of it – I live this!

This morning I realized that my internet sites and accounts are adding up. I get a notice in my email at least once every month about one or more sites that need to be renewed. Every time I renew a web site, it costs more money and I hear that the costs are going up again in July.

When I renew a site I take that opportunity to review the dedicated server hosting service and make sure that I am happy with that service.  I take a look at the regular charges and review my notes on the history of that site over the past year. Some of my sites have been hacked and most of my hosting services have been a tremendous help getting that resolved and my content restored.

The sites that need the best support are the ones that have managed hosting solutions. Because the servers can be located anywhere in the world, having access to live technical support 24 hours can be important. One of my servers only allows contact by email. That’s not good enough for my important sites, so i will be probably be changing when my annual contract with them comes up for renewal.

For the most critical sites, a host that offers colocation services gives you the best assurance of a quick recovery in case of a major outage or hacking. Outages can occur because of natural disasters, like earthquakes or floods, and disruptions in the power grid. I’ve heard that a series of sunspots over the next several months can be expected to cause some disruptions to satellite services as well as possibly the power grids for a large part of our country. So we have to be prepared for anything!

My cell phone is just a cheap, plain cell phone. I don’t text or take photos or anything. I just use it to make phone calls. But my brother has one of those really cool phones that does everything with special apps and he loves it. After my uncle’s funeral, he was showing me some of what he does on his phone, like Mobile Trading, and I was really impressed!

I’ve been doing Online Trading for a few years, after my dad showed me how to set up an account and track the activity of my stocks. It’s not hard to do, but it was a lot easier having my dad help me get set up and show me what to do.

I’m thinking about upgrading my cell phone now and getting one like my brother. I would like to do my own Stock Trading on my phone, along with other things like get directions, look up phone numbers, and even order a pizza from my car on my way home. But I think one of the coolest things is being able to trade my stocks from the doctor waiting room or the dentist chair, or even at a lunch counter. How cool is that?!?!