How Cheap is Your Commute?

NEW YORK - MARCH 09: Commuters wait for the s...
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Commuting from a nice, sterile suburb to the rough, exciting city where a lot of people work and play is kind of the ultimate dream of a lot of different people. At one point in history, taking on the use of a car granted people a level of freedom to move around that they had never been able to enjoy before. But in this day and age, where a couple of hundred houses may have nothing around them for miles in any direction but only have tiny individual plots of land apiece, one starts to wonder at the level of freedom this really provides for anyone. Without public transportation, a car becomes a necessity, after all.

And precisely how free can an individual be, when their very livelihood is predicated upon not only having a job, but also having their car so that they can get to their job. Without a backup plan, the illusion of freedom is a shadow behind which indenturing stays only slightly hidden. The car, which looks like a shiny steed of mobility and the capacity to go “wherever you want” becomes a prison of its own, due to construction, traffic, and the fact that more and more of a person’s day is bound to be consumed by the tedious act of going further and further from their exurb to or from whatever they actually want to do.

While the immediate feeling of a car is that it is cheap, available freedom to go wherever you want, this feeling is erroneous for more than just the fact that you may only go where the road allows you to go. You are also constrained on the affordability front. Have you ever stopped to crunch the numbers on what a car costs? Everybody knows what the monthly payment on their car is (unless they’ve paid it off), but how much money are you shelling out through interest? How much is insurance really costing you over the years? And when you add in gas, the occasional tire that needs changing, oil and other maintenance, cars are not so cheap.

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Booklets Are A Great Way To Market Your Business

NEW YORK - DECEMBER 08: Paul Costiglio, a mar...
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As a business owner, you understand the importance of marketing and advertising. You want to drive current and new customers to your business in order to create new income for you. You have printed business cards and stationery. Part of your marketing material package also can include brochures and booklets. Booklets are a great marketing medium.

A combination of a small brochure and a full catalog, booklets can provide company information or product information. You can give your customers more information using a booklet than a single-page flyer.

It is important that your booklet provide the proper impression, so your booklet printing needs to be of good quality. The design of your booklet should also be of high quality. There is nothing worse than distributing marketing materials that look as if they were designed by a first-grader with a box of crayons.

Here are a few things about booklets and booklet printing that can guide you along the way.

• Most booklets are printed on offset printers that can ensures that all the pages come out looking the same.

• The offset printing process allows very large print quantities at a good price point. You want to reach the largest number of potential customers as possible with your message.

• Your booklets will be printed in full color. This will give your piece a visual impact. Work closely with a graphic designer to make full use of the printing feature.

• Today’s print companies have fast turnarounds. By using modern digital printing technology, your projects can be delivered to you in a very timely manner.

• Booklet printing is affordable because of modern printing techniques. This will help you stay within your marketing budget.

There are many online print companies that can help you with your booklet project.

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Filed Under: Business Finance, Telecommuting Tagged With: , ,

How Responsible are you for Your Employee’s Commutes?

Timbuk2 Commute
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Everybody knows that a business is legally responsible for the amount of greenhouse gases it emits as a direct result of its operations. If you have a factory, a retail store or a distribution center, that center most likely uses some degree of fossil fuels to do what it needs to do. And by extension, it uses electricity (which often comes from fossil fuels) and heat (which is even more likely to be fossil fuel based). These emissions are difficult to control, and will be even more difficult to get rid of entirely, when the law inevitably declares that fossil fuels may never be used again. Of course, by that point, a gallon of gasoline will probably be over $1,000 due to a rather acute level of scarcity on the supply side.

But beyond the obvious sources of greenhouse gases, there is another. It is known as Scope 3 (as opposed to the other two Scopes), and it concerns all satellite aspects of a company. If your suppliers produce greenhouse gases because they work with you, you are essentially producing these gases by proxy. And if your employees have to commute to and from work (as most employees do), you may eventually be held accountable for the greenhouse gases which they produce in the process. As your employees commute back and forth to and from work, they may be emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases; and it’s all because of your business, after all.

How accountable are you for your employees? Is it their responsibility to seek out low emission or zero emission methods of commuting, such as using public transportation or zero emission electric vehicles? Or is it your responsibility to provide them with some sort of additional compensation, in reward for their putting in such a level of effort toward the emission reduction goals of your organization? When you begin to take responsibility for the activities of your employees, you begin to realize that their actions are major contributors to your business’s carbon footprint. In the modern world of capitalism, the owners of businesses need to take responsibilities.

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Filed Under: Telecommuting Tagged With: , , , ,

How to Telecommute

NEW YORK - DECEMBER 09: Paul Costiglio, a mar...
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Are you an employee who is tired of having to drag your life all around town, just to get to a job you could pretty much do at (or at least from) home? While you might think that this is the impossible dream, that might not be giving your employer enough credit. After all, there are a few different benefits your employer can receive from having you telecommute, at least part of the time. For one thing, they do not need to supply you with an office, they can save utility costs for your power usage, and they can get a nice little public relations boost from your telecommuting efforts. But of course, there are some disadvantages you will need to counteract in your sales pitch.

The name of the game when you’re trying to sell an idea of this nature is to focus on how your telecommuting benefits them. If you tell them, “I’ll save $2,000 per year on gas,” they will probably say, “that’s great. But what’s in it for me?” You can tell them that they can save x amount on your office space, and x amount on how much power you use in an average year. Every office wants to keep its costs as low as possible, and if you do your research and come up with hard numbers, those numbers will say something. Seriously, how much power do you use at the copy machine? How much power do the lights in your office use? And your computer?

Consider that the average desktop pc uses approximately 105 watts per hour. At 40 hours per week, that is 4,200 watts. At 50 weeks per year, that is 210,000 watts… just for your computer to sit there on, while you make copies, review files, or go out to lunch. And that is a figure you could put together in five minutes. Imagine what you could do if you thought about this for an entire afternoon. Put it into a nice, clean couple of pages, and lay it on your boss’s desk for his or her review. Who knows?

Filed Under: Environment, Telecommuting Tagged With: , , ,

Telecommuting is Great for the World

When you get up in the morning, do you have to throw on fancy clothes, drive across town (or even to an entirely different city), then work for a set number of hours so that your employer knows that “somebody is there?” If you are an employee and work that kind of life, you most likely get irritated with it on a frequent basis. If you are a business owner, you have a lot of different considerations as to why that way is becoming something of an antique. It goes back to the days before we had all of these extremely sophisticated ways to keep in touch with one another, and before we could do just about everything from home.

But in this day and age, we have a huge amount of connectivity at our collective disposal. A person can do fully 9 out of 10 things from home that they used to have to go to an office building to do. And keep in mind that the 10th thing involves scoring face time with clients, which is something you can always do at a coffee shop or a meeting hall of some kind. You could even talk to clients while you take a short trip to Florida. The world of telecommuting today has great advantges because you can get a Florida vacation rental today and still be able to complete your work.   This is the essence of telecommuting; what used to be done at an office can now be done right from home. You can just roll out of bed, brush your teeth and get to work. And if it happens to be noon when you wake up, that really makes very little difference one way or the next.

But this is more than just a get out of jail free card for workers who would rather lounge around than actually get anything done. Telecommuting is a natural extension of a growing trend which is starting to gain momentum, called Results Only Work Environment. If you want to be cutesy about it, you can call your workers ROWErs – but joking aside, results are what you want, and a commute wastes precious time. If you have employees who are not in regular contact with the public, and they work better at night, let them. It also saves gas.

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