Tim Barklage is the co-founder of St. Louis-based Better Life, a line of eco-friendly cleaning products that he is launching this month.
Doing more with less
The upside to all of these tools is obvious—use them wisely, and you can do more in a lot less time. For entrepreneurs with compulsive creative urges, the promise of exponentially greater productivity is a siren call.
Consider Tim Barklage. Barklage, 34, is the cofounder of St. Louis-based Better Life, a line of ecofriendly cleaning products that he's launching this month, while continuing to work at his full-time job in information technology for a $1 billion outsourcing company. Like millions of enterprising peers, Barklage needed to keep his day job while managing the monumental amount of work that goes into starting a company—and, he says, living up to his "obligation to be an excellent husband and father."
Wanting to ensure that he could be found wherever he was, he signed up for AccessLine, a "unified messaging" service that costs him just shy of $20 a month. On AccessLine, Barklage gets a single 800 number that he programs to follow him wherever he is. It sends calls to his mobile phone, work phone, home phone, or voice mail. He can receive faxes online, a huge help for a start-up, he says, because "vendors want your signature."
Barklage and his partner have also been developing packages, labels, logos, and documents with a changing cast of freelancers and vendors. To collaborate easily, Barklage spent a mere $10 to set up a personal domain in Google Apps, a suite of common tools that includes word processing, spreadsheets, Google calendar, a chat application, and a customizable website. With Google calendar, he says, "I can go into any Internet cafe around the world—or just use my cell—and we can all look at each other's calendar."
Skype and other phone tools
For entrepreneurs who rely on others to get their jobs done, communication can't be easy enough or fast enough. That's perhaps the reason for the phenomenal success of Skype, which allows Internet users to chat online and to speak to each other without the aid of a telephone—for nothing. Unlike phone, E-mail, and regular instant messaging, Skype allows you to communicate with several people simultaneously. Users with webcams can see one another (one extremely successful consultant covers his webcam so that no one sees him in his bathrobe). For $3 a month, customers can use Skype to call land lines and cellphones all over the United States.
Katie Paine, president of KDPaine & Partners, a 25-employee Berlin, N.H., firm that measures the effectiveness of public-relations campaigns, uses Skype to communicate not with outsiders but with her employees. "We're on Skype all day long," she says. About five of her employees work remotely, but the rest sit right next to her. So why Skype? Most of her local employees spend their days reading newspaper and magazine clips and coding them for data entry and measurement. They're concentrating, Paine says. "It's a very, very quiet office." Instant messaging on Skype maintains the silence.
Like most entrepreneurs, the gregarious Paine is pulled in many directions. A social networking aficionado, Paine employs a complex marketing strategy firmly grounded in Web 2.0. She blogs daily, automatically sends her blog posts to her Facebook page, and Twitters constantly. Her "tweets"—140-character microblogs—also post to her blog and her Facebook page.
All of that online chatter has led to numerous high-profile speaking engagements, including one with the Palo Alto Research Center in California, "and sold three or four books," she says dryly. It's a highly effective strategy for those entrepreneurs committed enough to keep it up but one designed to make the calmest among us get a case of ADD.
