This Tech Marketing Founder Breaks Down Why Your Business Belongs in the Cloud
Hello, mobile workplaces.
Photo: Christina Jones Photography
Contrary to what you hear, the cloud is safer than ever before with myriad opportunities to scale your business. Years ago, companies had to buy robust data racks and hire IT professionals to handle all the IT needs of a company 24/7/365. It was time-consuming, and a huge expense that small businesses simply couldn’t afford.
Nowadays, the cloud offers security, scale, and more at an affordable price, making it one of the best solutions for businesses of all sizes.
Businesses are often confused about moving to the cloud. It makes sense to feel overwhelmed since the cloud can often seem elusive and mysterious. This confusion can make it hard to make the leap to cloud storage. With that in mind, let’s break it down.
What exactly is the cloud?
The cloud is a central location where you backup and store all data, making it accessible from any location with an internet connection. Cloud providers maintain data centers where the information is stored (and often replicated to another data center) for safekeeping in case a complete meltdown happens.
If your business operates at all online, more than likely you should be considering the cloud. Here’s why:
1. Mobile Workplaces
Accessing files from any location, rapid sharing, and auto backups means the cloud enables you and your team to have the perfect mobile workplace. Store your images, audio, video, and files directly to the cloud instead of spending time and money upgrading hard drive space for every employee.
2. Security & Cyber Criminals
It’s not just financial or healthcare data that cybercriminals want anymore. Any data can be used for ransom, including photos, research, trade secrets, and even your website.
As a business owner, these are real issues to confront as you continue growing your business. You’re not only protecting your data, but you’re also protecting your clients’ data. That means all personal client information, credit card data, passwords, usernames, and emails are your responsibility.
Depending on your cloud provider, they can protect your business from cyber threats, DDoS attacks, and malware. The cloud also enables you to add multiple layers of security like two-factor authentication.
3. Data Storage & Backups
Remember that “Sex & the City” episode where Carrie’s laptop broke down, and she lost all her work?
For businesses, not backing up your data isn’t only risky—it’s irresponsible. Every entrepreneur should take some time to look at their business from a bird’s eye view, and that includes the technology demands of your business. Being in the cloud means that all your work can be automatically backed-up and accessed by your team with little to no effort—and at a more affordable cost than attempting to buy all the infrastructure yourself.
4. Scalability & Growth
Starting your business is one thing. Growing and scaling it is another. Lucky for you, the cloud is incredibly flexible. This means you can start a business with minimal IT requirements and easily expand your cloud storage space as your business grows with little upfront investment.
About the Author: Naly Rice is the founder and CEO of LNCG, a tech branding, marketing, and design agency. She is a blogger at NalyRice.com and is a burgeoning speaker who talks about entrepreneurship, women, and minorities in business and tech marketing.
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This story was originally published on March 16, 2019, and has since been updated.
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Set Aside 30 Minutes This Week to Do *This* and Keep Your Small Biz On Track
Money talks.
Photo: Christina Morillo for Pexels
Most people we know move gradually make the move from side-hustle to full-time gig. It’s a great plan to be sure that you’re able to support yourself financially while you’re laying the groundwork for your new business, but it can often lead to a bit of a messy overlap between your personal and business funds. (Trust us, we’ve been there.)
You may keep pushing off getting organized until the proverbial “tomorrow” and let the task of figuring it out fall to the bottom of your to-do list. You end up losing money because of missing receipts and not planning for tax deadlines. Follow the four steps below to make getting organized easier, painless, and maybe even a little fun, all in just 30 minutes.
Step 1: Open a separate bank account for your business ASAP
Is this something that you legally need to do for your business? Maybe. Is this something that you financially need to do for your business? Absolutely.
Even if you’re starting out as a sole proprietor, which is the default structure for anyone who earns income from self-employment, you should set up a separate bank account. Why? Because even if that’s the only thing that you do to get your money organized, you’ll be miles ahead of everyone else in the organization game. You won’t need to sift through a bunch of personal transactions to find business deductions and you won’t lose precious time looking through all of those same personal transactions to see if your client has paid you.
Don’t overcomplicate your business or waste any more time looking at a hodgepodge of transactions, hoping that you’re not missing something. Take 15 minutes to set up a separate account and you’ll be one big step closer to organized money management (congratulations!).
Step 2: Create a list of deductions you can take
There are so many deductions you can take, but it's hard to catch everything. Create a list of things you can deduct to ensure you're not missing anything. Tape the list to a folder and store your receipts in there until you can get them entered into whatever bookkeeping system you use.
Everyone will have different expenses, but a good list to get started with is:
• Web hosting
• Vehicle mileage
• Work travel
• Courses, seminars, licensing, and business-related books
• Shipping and packaging
• Office supplies and equipment
• Health insurance premiums
Step 3: Know what tax forms you need to file, and when
The first few months of starting a business will fly by and you’ll be left scrambling the night before filing deadlines if you don’t pay attention to some key forms and dates.
To get this started here is some basic information for sole proprietors:
Who has to file? Generally, anyone who has net earnings from self-employment of $400 or more needs to report this income at the end of the year. And anyone who is expected to owe more than $1,000 in taxes at the end of the year needs to make quarterly estimated income tax payments.
What form do I file? Most people start their business as a sole proprietor, and the forms that you need to file at the end of the year are Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (profit and loss from business) and Schedule SE (self-employment tax).
When do I file quarterly estimated tax payments? Keep track of estimated payment deadlines or you’ll face a penalty come tax time. Deadlines for taxes on income received each quarter are April 15, June 15, September 15, and January 15 (of the following year).
Step 4: Set a weekly money date
This won’t be your most fun date, but it’ll probably your most profitable. Set a time to check in every week and make sure that your money is on track. If you do this weekly, it’ll become so easy and quick. Once you have this done, you've earned a glass of wine and a great stress-free weekend. Some things to do weekly are:
• Send any invoices that are due
• Look at who hasn’t paid and send reminders (+ cash any checks!)
• Pay any outstanding bills
• Pay yourself weekly salary/stipend
Bonus step: Set up a bookkeeping system
Look at you, you overachiever. You’ve got this organization thing down and you want a bonus step? You can feel even more legit and in control of your money by setting up an easy bookkeeping system. This doesn’t have to take a long time and it doesn’t need to cost a lot. There is a range of easy to use programs out there (some are even free!) that are better than that excel sheet you’re using.
Remember—better to get organized now than to create problems for yourself and your business in the future.
This post was originally published on February 7, 2018, and has since been updated.
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The Blogging Business Key Nobody Is Talking About
And everybody should be thinking about.
Being a style publisher in 2016 is a multi-faceted job if there ever was one. Creating blog posts, photoshoots, running a website, liaising with brands, networking, researching, snapping, Instagramming, and more - all within a week’s work. If you categorize all these tasks, you’ll see they fall into three block pillars: Content, Business Management, and Tech.
This division is technically right, but it doesn’t identify the most crucial factor: that all three pillars overlap, and understanding the intrinsic relationship between them is the key towards the longevity of your blogging business.
So what is this mysterious intersection between the pillars of your business? And why is it important to understand and develop it?
WHAT IS THIS MYSTERIOUS INTERSECTION BETWEEN THE PILLARS OF YOUR BUSINESS?
Translating an overarching business vision through your digital presence is the one thing most publishers should consider when thinking of all the tasks their job entails. And it’s not even their fault. To put it simply, nobody in the industry is really acknowledging it. Well, almost nobody.
I launched my company, chloédigital, when it became clear to me that there was a gap between the fashion and tech worlds that was stopping great publishers from moving forward. Through our membership, my team and I now offer bloggers access to an all-rounded support system to strengthen their personal brands and power their online empires.
At chloédigital we look after some of the most successful blogs in the industry and the common factor that makes top-tier bloggers stand out from the competition is very clear: their business vision is holistic and cohesive.
Working closely with leading influencers around the world (a few of which will be panelists and mentors beside me at C+C DTLA!) has put me in a unique position to gain insights on the fashion industry whilst still having a foot in the tech world myself. I have seen first hand how working with a multidisciplinary tech and strategy team can be a pivotal point to grow a blogger’s online authority. But there is still much more to be done in terms of connecting all aspects of an influencer’s presence and decisions, on and offline. Working with a PR agency on one end and a tech team on the opposite end, with any content decisions torn in the middle, is just not an efficient way of approaching your business anymore.
The future of digital publishing lays within integrating every team and detail cohesively to reach new goals.
A very extended misconception about style publishers is that, as mainly creative professionals, content creation is the aspect of their business that drives most of their strategic decisions. But the reality in digital publishing is that, when there is a disconnect between the technical and creative side, it is actually the technical side that holds the veto power in key decisions. Let me give you a couple of examples of things that are commonly heard:
“I would love to add a new awesome functionality to my blog that I’m sure my community would love, but I’ve never seen anything like it so I doubt I can do that on my site,” or “I was very excited about the new style of blog post I published recently but it seems my readers didn’t respond very well to it; I’m not quite sure how to look deeper into these reasons, so I will just go back to standard content”.
Great ideas, content, and opportunities for innovation that get lost in translation as soon as a tech barrier is encountered. This is exactly why bridging the gap between fashion and technology is essential in order to keep digital publishing thriving. When there is seamless communication between content creators, agents, sponsors, designers, developers - that is when new things can be both conceptualized and well executed.
"Bridging the gap between fashion and tech is essential to keep digital publishing thriving."
Tweet this.
If you’re a style publisher truly looking to create a sustainable business, stop thinking of tech and fashion as opposites. Connect your teams, think always big, and start creating a multidisciplinary space within your working process that allows you to push boundaries.