The final simple and often overlooked component of this series is a phone system. I’ve never dealt with a multimillion dollar organization that did not have an extension-based phone system. It’s one of the costs of doing business at that point. Someone or something has to route calls to the appropriate individuals in a large company and although this role is often augmented by a human who parses the calls for select individuals (such as executives & sales departments) or perhaps a front desk receptionist during standard business hours for all incoming calls, more often than not it’s handled primarily by a PBX system.

Just a quick review for those unfamiliar; PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange. For more information than you really need or care to know, check out the Wikipedia entry. In essence, it’s a computerized telephony switchboard for a specific company, rather than the general public.  It handles call routing for the incoming phone number to specific extensions that are associated with individuals or departments.  These are the systems that we all love to loathe.  I can’t tell you how many times I personally have muttered into the phone “I just want to talk to a REAL PERSON!”  Despite the potential annoyance, it’s a necessary evil and can make your life significantly easier.  The key to overcoming this annoyance is in your voice recorded menu, make sure you list 0 as the first option, “If you’d like to speak to a FuzionTek representative immediately, please press 0″ and then continuing with “If you’d like to speak to Sales, Press 1.  For purchasing, press 2.” and so on and so forth.  If you can afford it, have the recording done professionally.  If not, just do it yourself - write yourself a script, practice it and record it.  It’s that simple!

The value in adding a PBX, notedly a VOIP PBX (Wikipedia article on VOIP here), is that you appear to have many more employees and organizational hierarchy than is actually present in your organization.  You can have an extension for Sales, Technical Support, Purchasing, etc and rather than the extensions listed on the voice recording or your website actually going to a person who’s job is dedicated to that - it can all forward directly to your cell phone or perhaps a single multiline VOIP desk phone.  You also get a tremendous amount of features that can often cost a high premium from your local telephone provider.  These can include voice mail, conference calling, music-on-hold, call waiting, caller ID, and simultaneous ring, all often found the with the ability to manage your phone system from an easy-to-use online control panel.

Now for the favorite part - cost!  You’d be amazed at the low cost options that are available to you nowadays.  If you’re looking for a quality provider that can help you with the setup to make the process as easy as possible and do so at a price point that’s extremely competitive for the level of service, I recommend giving the folks at HelpDesk Georgia a call (Disclosure: I do contract work occasionally with them to assist with the occassional influx of work) and talking to them about what would be best for your organization.  I also recommend that you do some shopping around - check out VOIPRanks.com and VOIPReview.org for additional companies and resources.  Of course, don’t forget to Google it.  If you have knowledge and ability to support and host your own servers, check out solutions for Asterisk/Trixbox on google.  Using services similar to VoicePulse’s VoicePulse Connect, you can get a phone line with free incoming minutes for as little as $11/month.  Just as an aside; no I’m not affiliated with VoicePulse in anyway - just happens to be one of the companies my clients have used in the past that I believe has a good price point.

At least for now, the business world still associates phone extensions with brick & mortar operations.  This works in your favor - your operation can be the epitome of business 2.0 and run your company while sitting on the beach in Fiji and still accept calls like you’re sitting in your office at your 14,000 square foot building.  How’s that for a hard life?

This concludes our first series about how to make your business appear larger on a typical small business budget - if you’ve got any ideas, input or even rebuttals - please let me know in the comments - I’d love to hear from you!

The second most important thing you can do to present yourself as much larger than you really are, is branding.  This doesn’t have to involve an expensive marketing firm who charges you $1000 for a logo and leaves you with a logo and nothing else…  It doesn’t have to involve 5,000 stress balls or other trinkets and trash to be given away at a tradeshow (spoken from personal experience…the mindset of some executives never ceases to amaze me) to people who will just throw it away or toss it into their “Tradeshow Trash” bag.  What I’m referring to is branding at it’s core.  This goes hand in hand with a quality website as mentioned before; you need to present yourself professionally and that there is SOME structure behind the curtain.

Some of the core elements you need to identify and decide upon are colors, logo design and the overall theme of your image.  Do you want something that fits in the technology, automotive or perhaps the healthcare industries?  Before running full steam ahead and spending money on expensive marketing firms, make sure you begin thinking about what YOU envision.  What images, colors, etc in your mind fit the embodiment of your company?  Remember to remain flexible, but it can make the process significantly quicker, easier and potentially cheaper approaching a firm with a few concepts than a blank slate.  A lot of money is made “Consulting.”  Again, google “basic branding concepts” for a few places to start.  Once you’ve got some preliminary ideas, there are several ways you can proceed.

First, give it a whirl yourself!  If you’re anything like me, you’re not the designer-du-jour, but you might be able to squeeze out 3 or so rough ideas.  Look at some of your successful competitors and although you can’t copy them, you can definitely take a few design queues from their branding efforts.  It’s a LOT cheaper to hire a graphic designer to polish your design than to hire a firm to do a complete branding exercise.  Again, your goal is 80% “good enough” - save that extra money you save and put it towards a one of the other topics discussed.

The second option is to hire a marketing firm.  I’d suggest finding a local company; ask around your network - someone most likely has a recommendation.  Work with them similar to how I discussed in Part 1; the topic is different but the methodology is the same.

A tertiary option, one that is oft overlooked, contact your local graphic design college.  Most graphic design colleges have classes in quarters rather than semesters, so it’s pretty easy to catch the school towards the end of one when a student has a bit more knowledge under their belt.  Ask them if they have any recommendations; perhaps they can put you in contact with a professor who teaches a senior-level class on branding and logo design.  If they will, ask the professor if there’s any students they’re aware of that would be interested in some work to further develop their skills and make a few dollars in the process.  I’ve seen great success with this tactic - most of the time the skills of a senior graphic design student combined with the concepts you’ve already drawn out in your head can yield phenomenal results at a price no firm can or will match.  Agree to let them use the work in their portfolio - they need one for school and for their career - plus it’s additional exposure for your brand!

Whether it’s for print marketing collateral, email & letter templates, business cards, or the design of your website, it’s much harder to establish yourself as a respectable company if you don’t even have a logo.  All of the aforementioned pieces require branding be addressed before you’ll see much success and are collectively all required pieces of a successful branding exercise.  As I said before - your goal is 80% “good enough.”  Once you’ve become successful and need to hire additional resources for your company to grow, you can then worry about spending some of your newly-found extra revenue on that missing 20%.  First and foremost though, never forget, a professionally designed and polished logo/brand, not something cooked up in MS Word or MS Paint using the latest Clip Art, will leave a much larger impression on your prospects.

Besides, to be honest, most people probably won’t notice the difference.

The first thing that dollar for dollar will give you the best return on your investment in growth potential is a quality website.  No other advertising or marketing will present your company as though you know what you’re talking about or to a larger audience better than a quality website.  When someone visits your website, there’s a good chance they’re there on purpose - they’re interested in your products or services.  This isn’t the case with direct-mail, cold-calling and other old-school methods of marketing.  A professional looking website with quality content will tell your visitors much more about your organization.  Remember - just because you have a professional website doesn’t mean you have to lose your personal touch!  These days more people want to do business with an organization run by humans; not corporate robots.

You’ll never see a large company with a horrid website and while you don’t have the $100,000 budget of Coca-Cola®, thankfully, you don’t need it.  With the evolution of technology,  prices have drastically dropped; making it even more irresponsible for serious business owners NOT to have a good website!  In 1999 a relatively simple website could cost you $10,000.  That same website could cost around $1000 today.  A lot of people will tell you to avoid template-based websites, however, if you hire a local company who agrees to use and modify a pre-fab template rather than a custom design, you’ll often see SIGNIFICANT savings and still get a quality result!  Take a look over at TemplateMonster.com or Google “Website Templates” for some ideas; you might not find the perfect website, but you can find “80% - good enough” for a tenth of the cost of a custom design.  Take that extra money and hire a copywriter to make sure the content of your website is top quality or invest it on some the options I’ll discuss in parts 2 and 3.

One important warning though; stay away from “free” templates, website builders, and companies offering bottom-dollar services.  Although there’s the potential for a very rare exception, you’re not going to get a Lexus® for the price of a Kia®.  Your goal is to make your business appear professional, top-notch and larger than reality.  A bad website is often worse than no website at all!  Make sure the company you’re looking at hiring has a diverse, high quality portfolio and is interested in least a semi-consultative role in the process and will include you as necessary during the design phase.

In my web design days, all my new clients completed a website profile form - requesting basic inputs on their goals, color preferences, or perhaps an overriding theme that represented their business.  I built the cost into my packages for 30-60 minutes to select a few templates (typically 5 to 10) that I felt were appropriate for the client.  We then spent 30-60 minutes reviewing my selections, picking one, and discussing if any changes needed to be made.  If more ideas or designs were desired, more time was offered at the hourly rate noted in the original proposal.  Ask the company you’re considering if they’d be interested in offering this type of service and if they offer a discount if you’ve pre-selected the template you want to start with.

A good website is the first component of quality informational marketing.  The day when you stop pursuing business opportunities and they start chasing you is the day you realize your small business has finally become successful!  You’ll never forget the day you run into the problem of needing to hire additional resources becuase you’ve outgrown yourself…

There are more bookmark management services out there than you can shake a stick at:  Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, BlinkPro and of course Firefox and IE’s built-in systems.  There are those that will argue Reddit and Digg aren’t primarily for bookmark management and I’ll agree; thus why I didn’t end up using them ultimately, however, they offer very similar functionality to bookmark management services and as such I know several people who used them as their current web bookmarkers…yes…we’re making up words now.  This, in my mind, really only leaves me with 3 quality options.

IE’s current system drives me nuts - it’s very limited in it’s capabilities and although I’ve heard IE8 will be bringing a ton of new features to the bookmarking platform, I’ve not gone the route of testing the currently available IE8 Beta 1.  Perhaps it’s merely due to the lack of syncing (addressed via an addon for FF) or that I just prefer not to use Internet Explorer…  No tagging; just standard heirarchal folder structures with no extensibility or sharing.

Regarding FF2; I have the same issues as I did with IE.  For the past several years though, I’ve been a loyal FF user, only using IE only for web development and testing purposes.  So naturally, it made the most sense to put them in FF!  Firefox’s saving grace for me was Foxmarks.  This little add-on is fantastic!  The short version - it syncs your Firefox bookmarks to their server and across any number of PC’s you have the plug-in installed on.  It addresses one of my major gripes and syncs my bookmarks across all 4 of my machines!  Even with Foxmarks, FF2 is still somewhat lacking though as it’s hard to sort or search them because of a lack of tagging or easily accessible search feature.  Yes, I know if I go to “Organize Bookmarks” and the Bookmark Library that I can search there - but that’s too much work…call me lazy…  Firefox 3 Beta 5 addresses some issues by adding Tags and “Smart Bookmarks” but I still wanted to be able to access them from any browser on any machine; even those without my beloved Foxmarks installed.

Next brings me to Del.icio.us.  As everyone knows, they’ve been around for a few years now and offer a relatively simple service.  The idea behind their system is similar to GMail - rather than organizing everything into folders, they organize via a system called tagging.  Now, I’ve mentioned tagging above, but if you are unfamiliar, tagging is merely applying descriptive words to an item.  Tagging this blog might result in “entrepreneur, blog, technology, marcus bearden.”   Each tag is seperated by a comma and each word describes the blog and it’s content.  They also offer the ability to share bookmarks with the community at large; something I really don’t see myself taking huge advantage of - but hey - it’s there if I want it…

Well - this week I began organizing all of my bookmarks into folders and preparring them for the Import to Del.icio.us…  Since I’m going for the full immersion treatment in my bookmark management practices; I needed to not only migrate my bookmarks over to Del.icio.us but I always wanted to replace my browser’s bookmark functionality with one that tied directly into Del.icio.us so I didn’t have to login to my account everytime I wanted to add a bookmark…  So, I installed the latest add-on for Del.icio.us for Firefox Beta 3.  I found information on the current beta over at DailyGyan and it contains the information you need to locate and install the plug-in for the latest version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 or you can just go to Firefox’s own extension site and install it there if you’re still running Firefox 2.  The add-on also adds a Del.icio.us sidebar so you can view all your tags and bookmarks from within your browser without having to open another web page just for your bookmarks.  A few quick notes; when importing to Del.icio.us, it will tag your existing bookmarks for you based on the folders the bookmarks are located in.  So if it’s located in the “Web Design -> Blogging -> SEO” folder in your browser, it’ll be tagged with “blogging, webdesign, seo” and any spaces will be removed since Del.icio.us doesn’t accept spaces.

Yes, I know I’m a bit behind the game in migrating to something like this but as I mentioned above; it was just one of those painful things I avoided for as long as possible.  Now my bookmarks are neatly tagged and organized.  I’ll report back later to see what my thoughts are after using it for awhile.  In the meantime, check out what few shared bookmarks I have setup so far over at my Del.icio.us page…

A freeware application known as LocalCooling developed by UniBlue Research Labs.  UniBlue has released LocalCooling as their way to help people conserve energy 1 PC at a time.  They are also marketing their product towards corporations with multiple PCs - imagine the savings when you effectively manage the power of 2000+ PC’s instead of a single PC!

LocalCooling is a very simple program.  It provides a few power management profiles that integrate with whatever power management system you are, or are not, using today.  It tracks the amount of energy you save using the more efficient power settings.  It displays your savings as # of trees, gallons of oil and total kilowatt hours.  It tracks your savings over the lifetime of your account and displays them locally on your PC and their website.  I’ll get to that more in a second though.  In addition to this it theoretically displays the total number of watts your PC is drawing under normal conditions.  It doesn’t calculate in real time; I believe it just gives a few real-world power usage numbers.  My laptop weighs in at 172 watts which doesn’t sound too off considering the power packed into this thing.  I’ve heard of some desktop PC’s being significantly off (WAY under) but again - it’s just an estimate using a database of information collected by the fine folks over at UniBlue.  To determine what #’s to give you, they auto-detect your hardware.  For the most part, this works very well.  The only qualm I have is that apparently my laptop has a 28″ screen - I’m impressed!!!  Those concerned with the footprint the application will consume on your PC needn’t worry…  It consumes a whopping 4.82 MB of ram and 4.82 MB of HDD space.  Right now it only works on Windows Vista or XP at the moment but they’re working on other varieties as I type this…

There’s also a “Group” feature which fulfills my ultra-competitive need!  When you sign up you can join a Group (or create one for your own personal circle of friends, your geographical region or your organization) and your total numbers for all of the grouped PCs will be tracked and included in their rankings.  There are 2 categories, Last Week and Lifetime, for both individuals and groups.

Seriously though - it’s a fantastic application and a great cause.  Worst case scenario maybe you’ll save a few $$ a year in power savings.  It doesn’t cost anything to use and it is spyware free.  Overall, it’s definitely worth the few bits of ram and space it requires - if nothing else than because I think it’s cool knowing how much energy I save when my monitor is powered off, my HDD spins down or I hibernate/shutdown my PC…

Get your own copy of LocalCooling2 here!

As those close to me know, over the past year, I’ve been going in 20 different directions.  The joke is, Don’t ask Marcus what he does for a living, ask him what he doesn’t do…  Most of my friends I grew up with have all graduated college, beginning their first few years in their lifelong 9-5 jobs or have chosen the route of procuring a post-graduate degree.  I decided to take the more challenging path…I’m one of the only ones in my circle who’ve managed to secure their income without taking the typical 9-5 route.  While some may look at this and respond - “WOW!  That’s phenomenal…” - trust me folks, there’s definite moments when I wish I had the stability & security of 9-5.  Now that I’ve been going through this for a few years now, it’s easier to sit back and review what made me successful and what failed to help me succeed. I’ve spoken with several individuals that I hold in high regard, individuals whom I consider successful in one form or another - professional or personal.  Most of these individuals have a substantial understanding of my life as it is today and they all agree when I bring up this subject.  I have put so much emphasis on sustenance and sustainability that I have lost the focus I need to be truly successful and get past this phase of entrepreneurship.

My biggest challenge today though is the one thing most every “life coach” would agree with, I’ve lacked a single minded focus for the past few years.  I’ve been sourcing revenue from 20 different opportunities rather than building on one focal point.  I am currently work on an ongoing contract basis with 5 different companies and am working on starting a few other opportunities right now.  Insane right!?  Well - the hardest part is done - I’ve already looked through everything I have going on right now and decided what my single most important focal point opportunity will be…  My ultimate goal and focal point for my efforts and energy.  The rest are a means of sustenance until my main is able to pick up the slack.

How do I plan on achieving that?  Systematically eliminating each individual distraction or opportunity that takes me away from focusing on my primary focal point.  Over the coming months, I need to generate enough sustenance so that I can begin migrating from 20 projects “moderately accomplished” to 10 projects “well done” and ultimately to sub-5 projects “flawlessly executed.”

By January 2009 I want to be able to fully sustain myself and my business partner (he’s married with 2 kids nonetheless!) solely on the efforts and growth of our current project.  I hope that those close to me can stick it out with me - it’s going to be a long year!

The latest change also includes adding what I’m going to call the Word of the Week!  Yeah…original I know…however, rather than limit it to strictly words - it could sometimes include slang or colloquialisms or perhaps just a word someone mentioned that caught my attention - real or fictitious!  So, what’s this week’s word?

eclectidelic: Pertaining to a continuous flow of thoughts that are diverse tangents from out-of-context, bizarre, or absurd sources, perceptions, or styles; non-sequitur stream of consciousness.

Example: It’s impossible to connect Bob’s eclectidelic ramblings into a sensible context.

Care Of:  SlangSite.com

I happened across it when researching the best way to describe the turn the blog has taken of the past months and for some reason it stuck…

My first trip started in early January.  I was working on an extended project for a client in Santa Clara, CA.  We flew into San Francisco and headed out to our new home for the month.  The project itself went well with the exception of the scope of the project significantly increasing (almost 60% over the original scope) and the forthcoming budgeting headaches…  I was there with a colleague and business partner for a little over a month.  In addition to our existing obligations, a new endeavour was born in Starbucks just outside of Chinatown, to be launched in the coming months.  From a sight-seeing/touristy perspective, we visited Napa Valley, Chinatown and Yosemite National Park.  There were a few smaller excursions, such as our night out in Santana Row, but overall, we were too busy working to get a lot of tourist-esque things accomplished.  Definitely grounds for a second trip though; I never even got to ride a trolley through San Fran!  Oh well, I at least sat on top of Lombard St…  The food on the trip was decent; the highlight of which was our dinner at Alexander’s Steakhouse.  Very pricey ($100/ea) but plainly put, tasty cuisine!  This was also my first experience with Wagyu beef.  My jaw hit the floor seeing a $250 steak on the menu but I was perfectly A-OK with my $50 Bone-In New York.  Overall, definitely not a place I’d ever plan on living (I really didn’t enjoy Santa Clara) but definitely worth a trip to go be a tourist sometime soon!

My next trip was to the GORGEOUS Broomfield, CO…  I absolutely loved it where we stayed.  Very classy area and a large variety of entertainment, shopping and food!  The scenery was exactly what you think of when you think of flatland just outside of the mountains.  Trees, rolling hills, mountain skyline and a little bit of snow to accentuate the snow-capped mountains in the distance - it was beautiful.  Sadly, we were only here for a little over a week.  Originally the project was supposed to last for 2 or so but as usual we managed to wrap-up early.  I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed to leave.  I’ll definitely be visiting Colorado again the first chance I get.  A lot of fruitful business discussions were had and groundwork began for my next project.

The third trip of the year was to Columbus, OH…  Ohio was actually not bad.  My past experience with Ohio was less than memorable - cold, drab and ugly weather in Mentor, OH working on a drive-thru kiosk for a major QSR client.  Columbus was much more enjoyable though.  Although we were only out here for a few days, it was a pretty good trip.  A little bit of business, a dabble of food and a night-time ride out through the surrounding country and overall I’d consider it a success.  It was defintiely a nice short get-away kind of project.  I’d be up for visiting Ohio again depending on the area, but it’s not on the top priority of places to go spend time…

My most recent and hopefully last for a little while began as a road trip.  Focused on development and growth opportunities for one of my primary business ventures, we left about 9am Monday the 24th of March and began our 9 hour drive up to Rockville, MD.  The drive was actually very enjoyable!  My business partner and I both agreed it felt like a college road trip, complete with low-budget hotels and coolers for snacks, drinks and meals along the way.  Great music, beautiful scenery, good company and fantastic business development dialog made the drive go by extremely quickly.  I spent a lot of time on my laptop working on the latest web-design project I’ve got underway.  It’s coming along well - should be unveiled in the next week or so!  The evening we arrived in Maryland we went to dinner at a place out in Washington DC by the river and enjoyed a decent meal.  The view and company were better than the meal, definitely not worth the cost of the meal but the developmental dialog over dinner made it well worth it.  You seldom go wrong with a nice dinner with executives and friends.  After dinner and during our endeavours to find a hotel, I managed to fry (Yes, completely) every cigarette lighter in my business partners car.  There went 2 fuses and my power inverter.  My laptop was drawing more power than the AC inverter could handle and it overheated, shorted and fried the fuses.  Tuesday morning consisted of a quick breakfast and some electrical repair and - most importantly - a new AC inverter!  Anyway, more meetings transpired the next day; all good stuff!  Finally we made our way Tuesday evening to Philadelphia, PA.  Philly was a whole different ballgame.  The mere task of finding a hotel was an ordeal but thanks to my handy-dandy Google, travel websites and GPS we managed to find one…  The next day consisted of more meetings (yay!) and finally my flight back to Atlanta…

Finally returning to Atlanta and knowing I’m going to be in-town for awhile was quite a satisfying feeling actually.  Sadly, what I expected to be a few relaxing days upon my return turned into 2 full days of a filthy & hectic project out in Covington.  We had to perform an audit on a heavy machinery warehouse, only about 1/5 of the total warehouse from a square foot perspective but it was a significant portion of their bulk assembly components.  Either way, that was the filthiest I’ve been in a long time - but it was a great stress reliever…

So, here I sit, on the heels of April Fool’s Day and I’m finishing my winding down period after a few long months of travel…  Now it’s time to begin the ramp-up for growth and revenue generation opportunities over the coming months.  Here we go again…

Quoted directly from the Tech In Demand post:

“Got a blog? Good! BlewSpace is an online application that I came across on another site that allows users to identify their blogs geographically on a Google Map. It is certainly not the most complex web 2.0 application that I have seen, but it does implement a simple idea really well. Bloggers, it is time to put your blog on the map.”

You can find the rest of the post here, be sure to check it out for more details and James’ perspective on  the utility of the service.

Check out our listing here!

Personally, I don’t want to spend $250 on a good card scanner (referenced below) and at the same time - I won’t deal with piles of rubber-banded cards around with post-it notes on them.  The post-its act as a sort of rudimentary tagging system.  Tagging is something I cry for every night after scouring through business cards.  The ability to easily tag business cards with certain info (such as notes from the discussion and where I met them) would make life tremendously easier.  I really wish there was a card management solution which integrated tagging to the digitizing method.  I’m sure many others have this desire as well, especially anyone who spends time in sales or networking.  Moving on though, let’s take a look at just a few of the existing options out there.

1. Rubber-Banded Piles –>  Everyone’s familiar with this method.  When you collect business cards, group them up and rubber band them together for later review.  The strength  for this method is primarily in that it is setup for easy grouping.  You can group based on company, name, where you met them, etc…  The shortfalls of rubber-banding are numerous…  There’s no easy way to search through a stack of 50 cards, the cards get damaged & worn (I’m somewhat particular about things like this…), there’s no duplication ability, it’s hard to keep notes about specific contacts, etc.

 

2. Add to Address Book –>  Another common answer is to add all of the cards to your Address Book (in my case Outlook & Thunderbird via Plaxo).  The method you get them there is up to you whether it’s a card scan or a high school student paid minimum wage a couple hours a week…whatever your fancy!  The strength is that you have the contact information digital and portable.  It’s easily duplcated.  You can also take notes inside of your address book.  The downside is you end up with thousands of contacts in your address book; most of which you’ll never need.  My Blackberry also syncs with my email address book - can you imagine syncing 3000 contacts in to a Blackberry!?  This brings me to the next half point…

 

3. (Really more of a 2.5) Enter high priority into Address Book –>  Ok, so this is obviously the next evolution/potential resolution to the problem presented in #2.  My response to that is:  “Excellent!  I now have the contacts I think will be important - what about if I’m not my stack of cards and need someone’s contact information that I didn’t think would be a priority?”

 

4. CardScan CardScan CardScan!  –> Alright, so I’ve heard this one more times than I can stand.  I don’t want to spend $250 on a CardScan Executive v8 (the Personal edition doesn’t scan in color).  I have a feeling I’m not going to have much choice, but I’m holding out as long as possible.  The CardScan option poses a LOT of benefits, duplication is easy, transportation is easy, quick scanning and it doesn’t HAVE to be included in Outlook.  The downside in my opinion is that I still don’t have access to all of my contact information if I want it on my Blackberry.  It does provide the digital records but not the mobile records.

 

5. Throw Away! –>  I’ll skip this one and merely say, I’m a packrat.  Plain and simple - I’ve tried many times to rectify this - but I’ve experienced far too many situations with contact information where I realize I need someone’s information from a few years back.  Simply put, this solution doesn’t truly solve my problem on a large scale.

 

My end-all solution is to have a ASP-model CRM solution with a separate client/server based-application that runs on my Blackberry that I can use to sync the CRM data with my local machine, my laptop and my Blackberry and have it still remain separate from my primary contact database.  Ideally it would have an option to link to sync certain information with my PIM, such as calender appointments and individual contacts I choose.  I’ve yet to find a software suite or CRM tool that provides that capability. I believe that, when combined with the CardScan method would provide nearly the ultimate solution.