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.
Over the past two decades, Americans have turned entrepreneurs into heroes. People who dream of running their own companies—from biotech start-ups to the corner ice cream store—imagine themselves as the next Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard dropout who founded Facebook and became a billionaire.
The reality, of course, is far different. The life of most entrepreneurs is one of never having enough—never enough time, or money, or connections.
Luckily for the millions of cash- and time-strapped small-business owners in America, inexpensive and free productivity tools have been exploding onto the Web. Most are designed to transform the chief-cook-and-bottle-washer life of the average entrepreneur into one that is a little more heroic—and far less chaotic.
Hundreds of software companies now offer so-called hosted applications—software that was once available only to large companies with the money and the technical staff to install it on site. Now, it's de rigueur for these tools to be elegant to look at and easy to learn. Task management software like 37 Signals' Backpack and "follow me" phone systems like Grand Central appeal to the diverse masses of entrepreneurs who want to use software without the rigors of actually having to read the user's guide—or take out a loan to pay for it.
Already, savvy entrepreneurs are dramatically improving their productivity and boosting their sales. But as these small companies grow, so do their workloads. Rather than add employees and overhead, many employ virtual assistants to do the mundane tasks they simply don't have the time to do.
Help for the "solopreneur"
One of the better-known proponents of productivity tools and virtual assistants is Michael Port, author of the book Book Yourself Solid and the soon-to-be-released Beyond Booked Solid. Port, a Tony Robbins-like author and speaker who coaches new entrepreneurs, is himself a "solopreneur." Says Port: "I don't need employees, and they don't like me."
But he does like systems. Like his mentor, E-Myth author Michael Gerber, Port likes to talk about working on your business rather than in it. "The tools you use are only as good as the philosophy with which you run your business," he says. "Every tool I use I create a constraint around," he adds, meaning that he follows rules for using that tool—such as spending only 15 minutes creating a regular presentation or checking E-mail only twice a day.
Rather than hire the dreaded employees, Port relies on seven independent contractors and a handful of affordable Web-based tools to manage his speaking and webinar schedules, bookkeeping, sales, marketing, and operations, which he runs from a home office.
Port and his team use RegOnline for registering attendees to his workshops and webinars ($3.50 per registrant); Basecamp, an online collaborative project management system ($12 a month and up); Wrike for managing E-mail as a team ($3.99 a month); and 1ShoppingCart.com for website orders and payment ($29 a month and up). His most expensive tool is Daylite, a customer relationship management package that's also hosted on the Web, for $189 per user per month—a price he calls a steal.
Perhaps Port's most innovative tool, though, is one he customized himself: He keeps his operations manual online, on a password-protected blog that he created with Typepad, an inexpensive blogging tool. It's part of Port's system of leveraging information and ensuring that the progress of his company doesn't rest on his shoulders alone.
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.
Zap clutter, gain focus
Indeed, distraction dogs entrepreneurs; many ache for the ability to focus. Using a wide variety of tools, focus is just what freelancer Denise Reynolds did. Reynolds, who writes about food, travel, and luxury from her home office in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., says she used to run away from her office when it was time to write. "My office was so claustrophobic that I couldn't write," she says. "I would take my laptop and go to Starbucks."
Two years ago, she set out on a quest to become mess free. Since then, she's banished paper from her office by employing a long list of Web-based applications, including ScanSnap and SpeedyScan, which convert paper files to searchable PDFs; Neat Receipts, for organizing tiny papers like receipts and business cards; and ClearContext, which manages avalanches of E-mail. Today, the precarious piles of paper are gone. "My office inspires me," she says. "Now I don't have to go to Starbucks to write. I can actually go to Starbucks for a cup of coffee," she says. "What a novel idea."
It's a novel idea that hasn't just made Reynolds happier. It's made her far, far more productive. And isn't that the entrepreneurial brass ring?
