Guest post by Susan Daniels

Due to the slow economy, businesses and professionals alike are looking for ways to save money on day-to-day operations. One of the highest expenses of any professional is that of the office. With a traditional office, businesses and professionals have to worry about rent, utilities, office supplies, and generally a staff. To reduce these costs, many are turning to the virtual office.

However, if you find yourself not wanting to relinquish your traditional office just yet, ask yourself the following questions. Your answers may just sway your opinion:

Do You Need All the Staff?

Having a traditional office generally requires you to have a small staff – even if it is just a cleaning lady or maintenance guy. However, with a virtual office you don’t necessarily need some of the staffers that you have. Keep your personal assistant, but do you really need a receptionist if you don’t have a front desk? Better yet, with a virtual office, you can hire a receptionist to be on-call so that you don’t have to pay anyone’s salary. You simply pay a minimal hourly fee. Continue reading

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Sponsored post brought to you by Office Genie

Working from home is all well and good when you’re starting out in business, but it does have its limitations. Despite being a cheaper alternative than renting an office initially, running a new venture from a spare bedroom, study or even the garage can be a rather solitary experience, although admittedly there’s no daily commute to worry about.

What’s more, with a business growing by the day then the home workplace isn’t always a practical solution to your expansion plans either. After all, how many of us occupy our spare bedrooms and other space around the house with all manner of other household items that tend to cramp our style? In short, working from home is easy, but it’s certainly not the be all and end all.

Time to expand

At one point in time a lot of people building up a new business would have baulked at the thought of moving into rented office space. Today though, thanks in part to the recession and a wealth of available property, it is now quicker, easier and cheaper than ever to rent good quality working areas. Continue reading

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The Sony PlayStation network hack and the millions of customer whose private information might have been accessed is one of the prominent headlines this week. So was TJX and their security breach at its time, being considered the largest data breach in history as over 40 million credit cards had been stolen throughout their stores in the US and Canada. So was every big financial data breach.

For those of you who don’t know, one of Mirror Communications’ clients, CoSoSys, develops endpoint security and data loss prevention solutions. Since I fist started to work with them, more than three years ago, I have been reading about data breaches every single day. I cannot remember the number of hospitals exposing patient data, financial institutions having client details stolen by employees, laptops and flash drives with important databases being lost or stolen, or the number of instances where military units (in the US or other countries) where either broken into and having data stolen or lost because they either weren’t paying attention, or because they did not care to properly dispose of it.

What lacks more than the obvious protection against such security breaches is knowing how to deal with the PR crisis that follows the data loss or theft. So after personally reviewing so many PR fails when it comes to data breaches, here’s a quick guide made up of useful tips to help you better deal with the consequences: Continue reading

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What’s in your resume is not all that matters in today’s highly competitive world. How it looks, how easy it is to find and to share add up to its effectiveness and its cool factor. Our web design partner, QBLK  (also responsible for this site’s design, that of Mirror Communications, Argophilia Travel News and many other wonderful works), have released an online CV/Resume template that will sweep you off your feet!

The Bold CV/Resume Template is easy to customize and has many different color templates to choose from, it has a mobile version to show it off on your smart phone, it can be printed to PDF and downloaded, to then be emailed in a second, and it also features a contact form, allowing all those interested in your work to get in touch.  And these are not all the features you will find use for! It also comes with thorough and comprehensive documentation, to help you adjust the template to fit all your needs. Continue reading

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Your company has an innovative product, a flashy and attractive website, a bevy of investors on board, and a technical support staff consisting of one intern that you spent five minutes training via email. What’s wrong with this picture?

How Tech Support Affects Your Company’s Image

In many cases, your tech support representatives are your only employees that regularly interact with your customers. When your support reps also happen to be your lowest paid, worst informed and (understandably) most short-tempered employees, can you expect your company to build a positive reputation among your target audience?

Tech support is under-utilized. Far too many companies treat their tech support teams as a last line of defense between angry customers and imminent organizational failure, and consider the idea of sending their tech team leaders to management schools as completely ridiculous . You should have two primary goals for your technical support services, both of which will improve your company’s image when accomplished: Continue reading

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