Business Built Freedom

How to keep business as usual when you're moving office? At some stage throughout your business career, you're going to have to move office. It's very unlikely you're just going to be sitting still in the same spot as when you started. When that time comes, you need to do some prior planning. This will make sure that you don't have any services go down and your customers can still contact you and ultimately as far as anyone externally is concerned, it's business as usual.

Now, the prior planning I would suggest you make sure you do is to have things such as your internet, your mobile phones, your landlines, your email addresses, your website, security alarm systems, security cameras, the clock on and time machines and all that other jazz. I would suggest strongly not to your internet connection across. Do not go on one of those plans where you ring up your current service provider and they give you a cut over date. If you do this you are going to have to be nearly 100% sure on that date. if it happens to land on that date is not going to line up with you guys moving office there's going to be a time period where one office is up and the other office is down.

Read more about Business Management: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/283-how-to-keep-business-as-usual-when-you-re-moving-office

If you're operating a small business of one or two years you can just tether to your mobile phone and use your mobile phone data. This is definitely more geared towards the type of business that has at least  12 to 50 users. You can't just join your mobile phone for everyone to connect to. So, make sure that you plan to get a solid new internet connection at the new location. Make sure that's up and running before you even consider moving anything across. That will give you the peace of mind that when you do start moving things, such as security cameras and what not, you'll have something to report back to base and monitor for yourself.

Now comes the next question, security. You want to make sure that there is a plan with your electrician to have everything wired up at the new location. By doing this you will have all of your security cameras and any of the data points readily available for when you move. This guarantees they've all been tested and trialed before you get over to the new office and start moving dozens and dozens of PCs and things like that. The last thing you want to do is get over there and have him there with his apprentice running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off trying to get everything sorted and connected while you just need to keep going. So, making sure all the wirings are done beforehand is important.

You need to be ready for the security camera cut over. I would suggest with the security cameras to not move all of them at once. Move some of them and then move a second batch. That way you solve security at both locations. This obviously again is size dependent, but if you've got a business that has only a few computers and not much in the ways of physical property to be stolen or something like that, then it doesn't matter as much. If you've got quite a number of systems and quite a lot of hardware items that are high priced items, you want to make sure that you do have some of the security cameras at the old location too. This will mean that you that you still have visibility at both locations.

That brings me on to my next point, the actual alarm system. The new building that you get should already be equipped with an alarm. If it is not equipped with an alarm, make sure that you've got that setup. You should have a service such as back to base or something like that installed. An external company should be monitoring for alerts and they will be able to send someone out and check it out if there is a problem. Once that's all set up and ready to go and you've got your internet, its time for emails.

Emails, emails, emails. They are the lifeblood of most businesses nowadays. If you're running an on-premise email solution such as Exchange, this is going to cause you more headaches than you've ever seen before.  You're going to have to deal with your hosting provider, your domain name provider, and your IT company who will be moving this server and changing the records and all sorts of stuff. It's not the end of the world and any professional should have done that a few times by now, but it's still just an extra headache that definitely needs to be planned for beforehand. If the records aren’t changed beforehand they can take up with 48 hours to replicate across. So, make sure to give any of your providers with your email plenty of notice. Having said that, if you're using solution such as Office 365 or C panel or Google suites, you're going to be fine to be able to have everything moved across and it should just start working at the new location good as gold.

The next thing I'm going to move on to is your phones. If your using any onsite IP PABX system, you need to make sure that the interim move that you're doing has been organised with your telco provider as well as having something in place where you're able to have it redirect to a mobile phone for that small amount of time that everything is being moved across. I would suggest going through your logs and having a look at your high and low peak times of your call throughput and making sure that you're doing the move at a time that is best for your customers and best for yourself for the phones.

So, most of the time in Australia because we're lazy, it's weekends which is when IT and telco really thrive ahead with all the stuff that we have to do. If you're lucky enough to run a business where you have maybe a half Friday or something like that, this is a perfect opportunity to get your phones moved across. Doing this can be more complicated than you think. If you don't have enough lines or trunks or bits and pieces at the other end, then you're going to run to all kinds of strife.

That is an infrastructure problem. You need to make sure if you're moving that they're going to have the capacity to run your business. If they don't have enough lines going out to the street, you won't be able to have as many phones. If the internet connection is slow and you're using VoIP phones or something like that, you won't be able to have as many phones. It's all stuff you need to be able to plan for beforehand. In a perfect world and best case scenario you'd be able to have all the emails with Office 365, all of your phones going through VoIP and have an amazing fast 140 internet connection to the new building ready to go. All you would need to do is pick up your computer and move it to the new location with your servers and everything else. You plug it and away it goes. The problem is it never happens. There's always little hurdles that come up in place.

In my opinion, you should really start planning ahead, about six weeks at a minimum before the actual move date. Do this so you make sure that you're going to be able to get everything done in the timeframe that you need to get it done in. You could plan significantly longer than, probably upwards to 12 weeks, but I'm a stickler for planning. I love making sure that I'm well ahead of the curve and there's no undue stresses on the day. So, that's my hints and tips on how to move office and keep your up time and your customers happy.

I've been asked today to talk about the pros and cons of a flexible work environment. While working from home might mean fewer distractions, people can get lonely and it can lead to spending long periods of time online. Working from home requires a certain level of discipline. I would say you need to have a balance between working from home life and your social life. I know myself when I was in a relationship with someone that did work standard hours and I was in a flexible work environment, I was sometimes seeing people and sometimes I wasn't.

How to Deal With People

I found that she would come home from work and be exhausted and not want to talk to anyone. She was in a retail environment so she was talking to people all day, where I was in silence all day.  I would be like a puppy dog wanting attention and pestering her when she just wanted to sit there and watch TV. I believe you have your pros and cons to a work environment and also a flexible work environment. The key here is understanding that this is the case. You don't want to go crazy, become a hermit and start using a rope for your belt and sitting at your computer in your jocks. You need to make sure that you are still acting as if you're going to work. If you have the mindset that you're at work and you're wearing the things as if you're at work, you will perform as if you're at work. When you take your clothes off, yeah and change into your casual wear when work is finished, you'll feel like work is finished and you'll be able to create that segregation. This will let you not spend too much time working and let it suck your life away.

Setting Up Your Workspace

It is also important to make sure that you have a nice room and environment set up to be your work sanctuary. If you do that, you'll be able to know that when you're in there, you're in work mode and when you leave, you no longer in work mode. That will give you a bit more separation when you are working flexibly. In short, make sure you're drawing a line between work and home. When you're working at home, have a room and an environment devoted to it. Make sure that you understand that when you see someone after work that you don't go and slobber all over them and make them feel like you're suffocating them. Remember that they have been at a workplace and you've been in an environment where you aren't talking as much. I find myself, starting to go stir crazy working from home I'll do silly things like starting up a podcast channel, but normally what I do is I just go for a run. I just bolt out the door and go for a run for 5 or 10 minutes, or to sit outside on a hammock and just look outside amongst the yard and go, "okay, cool. I've had a little bit of break, time to come back into reality."

Final Thoughts

So, they're my hints and tips on how to deal with working flexible hours. Try and still get into the office occasionally and have that human time, even if it's just through a Skype conversation. It's sensible just to reconnect so you don't go stir crazy because no traditional work environment and no people make Joshua go something. Go crazy? Don't mind if I do!

New year, new you, and you've decided to start a new business. This could be anything from a floral arrangements to a mechanic, or anything in between. Maybe you're going to be the next Elon Musk. Who knows? But what's important to know is to make sure that you have an appropriate business structure. You don't want to be starting a business if you think it's going to go in a certain direction, and you don't have the trust, proprietary limits, all the other stuff that comes with a business.

Read more about Business Tips: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/327-how-to-start-a-business-in-australia

Business Structure

Make sure that you've got the appropriate structure for what you're looking to do in business. A lot of the time if it's just going to be you offering a service or a product that you're making from home, so a hobby-type business, being a sole trader with just an ABN can be sufficient. If you're the type of person that has gone and invested into a lot of property, or the service or business that you are starting up has a legal backing, you want to protect your assets, and that's where you need to look into things such as distribution trusts, and proprietary limited companies.

Writing a Business Plan

Once you've worked out the business structure, it's then time to move on to writing a business plan. When you're writing a business plan, it's very important that you think about where you are now, where you want to be, when you want to sell the business and all the steps in between. It seems weird to think about selling the business when you haven't even started it yet, but you should always be functioning with the end in mind. Doing that will make sure that the steps that you take beforehand are calculated and you have a beeline straight from where you are now to where you're going to end up.

A Business is Like a Car

Look at the business as a vehicle. Some people start a business because they think, oh, I could do that cheaper than someone else. It's a hard ask to sort of jump from that to actually have a business where it's going to start off as the most financially competitive business and then strive onwards from there. It's sensible just to make sure that whatever the product is that you're selling, you've got the end in mind and the steps that you're taking. If you're looking to have this as a vehicle to success, you want to make sure that this vehicle is going to succeed. If you think to have this success you need only yourself, that's awesome. But if you think you need 10 employees and a solicitor, then you need to make sure that the price point that you have for your idea is going to allow for the whole team of people to be paid.

Have a Budget

It seems like such a basic one, but it gets overlooked so much. Things like having a marketing budget to actually get people to hear about your device needs to be taken into account, and this can be anything from 5% to 50%, depending on the value of your product. That's something where it's a great idea to go in and have your idea tested. If you've got something that you've made that's a physical product that you can put in the hands of someone have people test it. See what they think about the product and how it's going to react with them. Doing this can give you some great insights, especially if it's 100 random people.  This doesn't have to be an overly formal process, you can just be walking along at the beach or wherever you think this product might be used and then see what people think about it. If you have 100 people that have seen your product and you've written down the results, you're able to then target your marketing accordingly.

Don’t Be Too Broad

Never create a product that you think is going to work for everyone. Lets use the example of the fidget spinner.  If it was only marketed to people who are selling goods to retirement homes, and people that are retired, they wouldn't have sold anywhere near as many as if they'd have sell it to people who can't keep their hands still and kids. So it's important to test your market and see who that product is actually going to be of interest to.

Time to Name The Business

Now, hopefully you've got yourself a fantastic little product. You've got a bit of information as to how you're going to market that. You've got an idea of how the legal setup's going to look. The next most important step is to work out a name for your business, and names used to always start with A or double A or triple A to be at the start of the yellow pages. It's really, really funny how many businesses still exist around that have that same mentality and the same letters at the start. What you need to make sure you do is name it something that short, sweet, and concise. Our business name, Dorks Delivered, most just refer to it as Dorks. We've got another business as well, Business Efficiency Experts. Now that's a long one, but we market it as BE Experts. So it needs to be catchy and to the point, you don't want to have it really overly long. A great way to work out how to have a good business name is to research what your product is, or of the type of people that will be searching for it on Google. Use something such as the Google keyword planner and see how many people are searching for that.

Keep the Domain Name Short

You don't want to have to have a domain name that's really, really long. You don’t want to have someone come to your website have to type in something that's 30 characters long to get there. They  they will make mistakes and ultimately that's going to drive customers away. So something short, sweet, and concise is always a great idea.

How to Manage the Business

If you've made it this far, and you've got everything registered, you need to be able to manage this business. There's different software packages out there that do this. Trello is a fantastic piece of software for project management. It gives you a great way to be able to distribute a task amongst several different team members and see the progress of the task as it's going along. That will allow for you to see different things about your product, such as marketing elements or the production of the actual product. You might be making this product in house or you might be outsourcing that over to China, or maybe you're just drop shipping something from China. If you're doing that, you want to know where you're at with the product, who's responsible and whose hands are in it at the moment, and where's it going next? That way you have good visibility on exactly where you're at and how much time it's going to be until it's live. You can do the same thing for marketing campaigns, all within Trello. So, Trello's a fantastic tool, and one you definitely need to have in your tool belt.

Take a Look at Active Campaign

One of the other great pieces of for when you start marketing is Active Campaign. Active Campaign gives you a lot of insight and information into what your clients are doing when they're opening up emails, when they're searching around on your website and it's not that bad on price. That is what they call a CRM or client relationship management system. That'll give you all your customer's details and it could be very helpful. For example, if you're a PT and you're selling services, you could have things in there such as your clients' weight details, their current measurements, and you can then see a progress of how that's gone over time. It could be anything that you're selling. Going back to the fidget spinner thing, you might be able to see that more and more people around Christmas time are looking at your website, and then you go, okay, it's time, because I've got existing customers that are looking at my website, to send out an email newsletter telling them that there's 15 or 20% off. 

Wearing All the Hats

Most of the time when you start a business, you are wearing all of the hats. You're the bookkeeper, the accountant, the technician, the salesperson, the marketer, and the tech guru. So you need to be able to manage your time accordingly and set different pockets of windows where you have time to do each of those tasks. Because if any of those tasks are missing, the whole ship will sink, so you want to make sure that everything is being adhered to and is being looked at. It can become easy to focus on the one element that's bringing in money. If you're not bookkeeping for the one element that's bringing in money (the technical part of the job) you won't be able to see you're margins and how much you're actually making from that product, as well as any trends in data. When I use the word product here, I am talking about services as well, it's whatever the thing is that you're doing in the business. If you don't market your product, no one knows about it and therefore you're never doing it, so you're not bringing in any money. So it's always important to make sure all the cogs in the system are turning together.

Conclusion

You'll get to a spot where you have the time to document everything, and then you can start offsetting some of these roles to other people when the business is bringing in more money. That's when it comes into creating great documentation systems, so that you can grow the business at an exponential rate. I hope this has been helpful!

Congratulations! This is a really exciting time for you in business. I remember when I first started out in business. I thought, okay, what am I gonna be doing here? I wrote up a plan and made a decision as to where I wanted to go, and it was really only a couple time that I went, "this is when I've made it." One of those times was when I went to the bank, and they said, "you have enough of an income to be able to buy a house." So in Australia, that means you've got at least two years of positive financials, where they'll then take the lowest of the two years and take that as your income, and then they'll allow you to buy a house. That that was fantastic. So I went, "woo-hoo!" I've been doing it and now even the bank agrees that what I've been doing is right and it was a moment of success for me.

Hiring an Employee

The other one was when I hired my first employee. That's what we're gonna talk about today. If you're at the spot where you're looking to get your first employee, you're obviously growing enough and you're passionate enough about the business. If you're getting your first employee, chances are you've already had contractors working for you. That's a good spot to get some understanding and visuals as to how people are gonna work with you. Unless you're gonna be converting one of those contractors across to an employee, you're going to have to train up this new employee. This can take time. It obviously depends on the industry that you're in. If you're in any of the professional services industries, this can take a number of months. For me, my first employee took about seven, eight months before they're actually ready to go and they were doing the tasks that I wanted them to do when they first started.  That meant that I needed to have eight months ready of money to pay them as they're ramping up to be able to become the productive person that I wanted them to be.

Where to Find An Ideal Candidate

So you've got a bit of funding behind you, which is awesome. Now you need to have a think about where you are going to find this ideal candidate. For my first employee, I jumped straight on Seek, and put an ad up there and had a look at how it went. I had a few different systems that I put in place beforehand to make sure that I got the right candidate. One of those was I had an email written within the body of the job application that I popped up on Seek.  I stated specifically within the job application that attention to detail is a must in this business, and if you would like to apply for this job, make sure to apply through [email protected].

Moving Forward in the Employee Search

After they applied, I then had their email captured. I looked at their name and popped them into a list. I sent them out a Myers Briggs test to check their compatibility with our other team members, which at that stage were all contractors. I measured how long it took them to respond to that email, and then gave them another questionnaire which asked them a few other questions such as driver's licence information and what their primary, secondary, and tertiary interests were in the field. I did go over the top and it's not something that everyone would go and do. What this did do was that it screened out a bunch of people that just applied through the normal way, where they were not actually reading the job information. Those people that don't have an invested interest to even read the job application are not going to have the attention to detail that most people will need in business. So that's a little handy tip that I've done in the past, and I find it works brilliantly.

Another Tip

In the footer of the job application, write your name on it. If they respond and they don't respond to you with your name, it's again a good chance that they haven't really read it, or they don't care enough about the job. So those are two tips. Have them go to an email address. That's easy enough to do. And then make sure that you have your name in there and see if they actually write the email to you with their name. Ask for something like their resume to be attached as well. It's easy enough to do, but it can definitely help you with the search. When you put a job on Seek, a lot of the time that will bring in a hundred to 200 different applicants. Doing these few things will help you filter out a bunch of the applications that are just noise. This saves you a lot of time and effort of going through crappy resumes.

So. Many. Resumes!

You're going to go through so many resumes, you're going to have resumes coming out of your face. You're going know every single resume font and layout that's ever been designed. Every template that's every existed to mankind will be in your brain and you're gonna hate it!  You will find people that have plagiarised other people's resumes and then just changed their name. It's ridiculous. I didn't even know that people would do that. Why would anyone do that? But it's out there. People do it. If you find a resume that's too long, you will throw it out.  You will have several different piles. You're going to have the pile that's "I'm gonna call back", and the pile "I'm never gonna call back". The callback pile will always contain the shorter resumes that went to the point and showed you the information that you needed to see as quickly and as easily as possible.

Do Some Research

Once you've got a list of people they will be your candidates. Turn them into a list of people and then do a bit of Googling. See how much information you can find out about these people. Most of the time, if they're good candidates and they're professional, you're not going to see them popping pills and snorting lines of cocaine in their Facebook public profile, but you'd be surprised. This process will again just trim the bush down a bit to a manageable size where you can then know who will get a call and who won't.

Get Appointments Set

I find, once you've got a good manageable size, email them all and organise appointments. One way that you can do this is using a tool called Calendly. This gives them access to your calendar to be able to schedule in when your free time is. You can then have them all slot into different times as opposed to going backward and forwards.

What Questions Will You Ask?

Once you've got them all ready to go, it's important to have a set list of questions that you're going to ask them. You want the questions to be divided into three main categories. One of the categories is going to be your general housekeeping stuff. Are they going to be able to get to the job? Do they have a car? Are they able to work the hours you've asked them to work? What happens if there's work that comes outside of the scheme of what would be your standard day? Asking a few of those sort of basic questions is a good idea.

Technical Questions

Once you've done that, have the technical questions ready. Try to make it stuff that you can't Google. Since this first meeting is just going to be over the phone try have it really detailed. One of the questions you could ask would be, if you were in the window repair industry, what year did glazing putty become phased out? Where would you be using that? That's a really weird one because a lot of the people nowadays don't even consider even using that. A lot of the time they just ask you to replace the whole window frame. But nevertheless, just have a few questions up your sleeve that is a bit obscure that are harder to answer.

Give Them A Chance to Ask Questions

Once you've got your technical questions and your HR questions out of the way, ask them a few questions they might want to ask about you. Maybe it's just as simple as, do you have any questions that you'd like to ask us? How did you hear about us? Why would you like working with our team? What are your weaknesses is a great question that you can ask them. That gives you an idea of how they rate themselves. Someone who says, "I don't have any weaknesses," is not being truthful to you. You can always hear the change in their tone of voice. There's a fantastic series of books by a guy named Paul Ekman which discusses how to hear and read people around their body language and what they're saying. If it's something you wanna get more into, it's definitely worth checking it out.

Face-to-Face Interview Time

Let's assume the phone interview went gangbusters. It's understandable, they might have been a bit nervous, but you let that pass because you knew that they are going be the best candidate for you and you would have been nervous in their shoes. They now are in the face-to-face interview. It's important to have a second person there to be looking over what they're doing. If they start fiddling or looking away, you can a lot of the time assume that they might be either still nervous or lying to you, depending on the question that was asked. There are services out there that provide you with someone to sit there with you in the interview and analyse the candidate. This can take some of the strain away from hiring. When I hired my first employee, we did take on the services of someone. They allowed us to have a higher level of professionalism and understand exactly what the interviewee was saying when I was asking the questions. You will be as nervous as the person interviewing, if not more nervous. So having that safety net is a great idea.

Price

Next comes the big one, which is been on everyone's mind since I started talking about this, the price. How do you price up your employee? How do you give the employee incentive to work harder, better, and more optimised than what they would've otherwise? I would suggest, if you work in any of the award industries, jump onto the websites where you're able to see these numbers and work out what you should be paying them. If you don't, if you work for any of the industries that don't come under an award, reach out and think about what you're comfortable paying, and if that lines up with the type of person you're looking for. More money does not mean a better employee. I've seen employees that have come in here and they've wanted 150-180,000 dollars, and they performed more poorly on the questions asked than the employees that wanted 30-50,000 dollars. The people that have big resumes with lots of certifications and degrees also do not necessarily perform as well as the people that have been in and out on the field doing the work.

Look Out for Alarm Bells

The other thing you need to look out for is big name drops. If they say, "oh, we've been working for Hewlett Packard," or, "I've been working for Microsoft for a number of years," and you think geez, they must be good! But the problem is, as soon as they work for any large corporation, their information that they see and their job gets popped into a tiny, tiny little box. You're a small business. If this is your first employee, you're going to want to have them doing more than just a small amount of work that's just very, very specialised. So I would personally, as your first employee, steer away from anyone that has big corporate experience because they're not gonna fit in the box that you're gonna give them.

What Incentive Scheme Will You Use?

Assuming everything's gone well, you now need to work out the incentive scheme for them. The incentive scheme varies from industry to industry, but you want to make sure you have key performance indicators in place. By doing this they can work to a metric and excel at that and exceed to be able to be remunerated accordingly. Once you've all agreed upon the way that you'd like the pay to be set out and the way that you'd like the incentive scheme to be set out, it's time for the legal paperwork to be handed across.

Time For Them to Get to Work!

Once you've done all the paperwork, they will finally start working for you. Having them sign things such as non-disclosure agreements, non-compete documentation, and having them sign anything that you think might protect you legally is a great idea. Having systems in place to be able to see that they are accountable and that they are responsible with the way that they're undertaking the work is a great idea. Also remember, this is your first employee and you are the business owner. As a business owner, you're very passionate about your business and you've been wearing lots of hats for probably a long time. You're probably the best person at this skill that you're doing. They are learning, and they will strive to become as good as whatever it is you've employed them to do, but they're still learning. While they might never be as good as you are at everything, if they're able to get to 80% of where you're at, that's 80% less stuff you need to be doing.

You Will Always Be The Most Passionate

Just know that you are always gonna be more passionate than anyone else unless you incentive schemes work out that they end up owning a part of the business. In that case, the person that you're employing isn't really an employee, they sort of become a partner. Then that becomes very muddy as to what their intentions are. So I'd say if I was you, do not incentive with shares or any schemes like that. Make sure that you're not too hard on them at the end of the day.

At The End Of The Day

So in conclusion, look out for wicked candidates but put some tricky questions in the interviews. Make sure that the way that you're grasping candidates is a way that you can see if they're actually listened to what you've asked. Interview well. Be ready for them to be nervous, as you will also be. Have accountability systems in place and incentive systems, and be ready to rock n roll. Good luck with your future adventures!

It's that time of year again, and lots of people have new years resolutions where they're trying to do better by themselves and become the best person they can. One of the things that are common in the new year is an increase in the number of people looking to get a new job. This might be you, or it might not be, but I'm going to go through and explain a few of the different things from an employer's perspective we see time and time again. The following are things you should look to refine in the way that you go to get a job.

Unique Resume

To start off with, believe it or not, we see people forge and use resumes over and over. When we have a job application go out, we might have 100 to 150 resumes come through. We sort through all these and look to see what are the good resumes that stand out enough to be worthy of an interview. Make sure that your resume isn't one of those ones that you've just copied off someone else. Be unique and make sure it stands out.

Pay Attention to Length

Make sure your resume isn't too long. No one wants to have a five or six-page resume that goes back to when you were 14 and 9 months and worked in McDonald's for two months. It doesn't make any sense. So, keep your resume short and concise. You don't need to put in things such as your partner's name, your star sign, and what religion you are unless those things are important to the job that you're going for.

Have the Right Order

Always order the things that you have on your resume from newest to oldest, so the newest thing should be on the front page and the oldest thing should be on the last. Only include jobs that are relevant to what you're going for. Have a great cover page that discusses exactly why you're the best candidate for this job. Don't use Comic Sans, and make sure that you are writing a resume that looks professional and doesn't have lots of colors. It's fine to have a little photo of yourself, or even a link to your LinkedIn page or something like that, but don't go overboard. Having your qualifications that are relevant to the job is also very important.

Be Prepared

This moves us on to my next point. If you're lucky enough that your resume went gangbusters and everyone enjoyed it, your next path is the interview. Most of the time you're going to get a phone interview and then it turns into a face to face. If it's a phone interview or Skype interview, be dressed as you would for the job. Now, this sounds funny, especially if it's just a phone interview, but it puts your mind in a good place to where you're able to go, "okay, this is what I'm meant to be doing." Trust me, you will perform better than if you're just sitting there in your jocks and socks.

So, be mentally and physically ready as if you're about to jump into the interview. If it is a Skype interview, be in an area where you're well lit, and using a very good quality microphone. Don't have kids running around in the background or anything like that. Make sure you keep it professional. Don't be nervous, they're only people as well on the other end. Sure, they might be psychoanalyzing you and thinking about all these different things, But they're just people.

Keep it Natural

One of the things I remember was an interview that we were doing over Skype, and this guy, he was lovely. He sat outside in his patio area, and it looked nice. There was just this one fly that kept flying around his eye, and it kept buzzing around his eye. I was looking at that, and I could not listen to what he was saying. I was completely distracted as to why he was not swatting this fly away. It just seemed so unnatural. Make sure that you are natural in what you're doing, and expect that you're going to be a little bit stressed out with the interview. When interviewing, the employer will take that into account. Just be natural, be normal. If you don't know the answer to a question, say you don't know. A lot of the time the questions asked in interviews are intentionally obscure. So, be ready for some of those questions.

For Face-to-Face Interviews

These tips go the same for if you are on site and you are doing this in a face to face interview. When you are being interviewed, a lot of the time there will be two people interviewing you. One is going to be listening to your responses, while the other is going to be looking at your body language and seeing how you act and react. This is one of those times that it's really important to make sure that you are being yourself. Don't be someone you're not. If you try to be, and then you even land the job, the problem is you might end up underachieving, disappointing, and then you're back where you started, only with an extra line on your resume.

Be Honest

So, always be honest. As I said, that other person that's sitting there that might be looking at the body language, they may also be asking questions as well. Sometimes there's one person will have the strength of HR, while the other one's got the strength of the technical skill, or whatever it is that you're being employed for. Either way, just know that one person is probably going to be looking at your body language. Keeping eye contact's a great thing to do. Don't feel like you should be looking at your hands. Don't play around with your hands too much. Just be natural.

Don't Over Answer

That comes to my next point, don't over answer things. If someone asks you something, answer but be aware of how long your answer for. A lot of the time when I'm interviewing for a phone interview, I'll set 10 minutes aside and say this is 10 minutes. I'll know that the next interview is not starting for 30 minutes, but I'll set 10 minutes aside going this is the interview, and then I'll have 20 minutes of reflection. I have a buffer in there for the 20 minutes of reflection where I can have the interview go over. If the interview starts creeping up to that 30-minute mark, I've got someone else that I've got to be interviewing shortly. I don't have the time to be listening to someone waffle on about something that isn't relevant.

If someone is talking to you about some interest that you've got together, maybe you both brew beer, or love cricket, whatever the situation is, just know that answer and say, "Ah, yes, I do have an interest in that. I love the One Dayers." And then go on and continue on. Don't over answer things.

You've Got the Job!

Now, if you're lucky enough to land the job and it's your first week at work, congratulations. The next step to do is don't be an ass kisser. We had a guy who started working with us, and he thought he was going to do everything he can in his power to shine and outshine all the other employees. What he did was he would get to work at seven in the morning and not leave until six at night. It was great, but the problem is, unless you've got other people that are working that same shift, it means that, especially in a small business, you have to have people hanging around because you're not about to give him security and responsibility to take care of the whole business.

So, you need to make sure that you are working, but if your employed for a 38, 40 hour week, don't be coming and working 55 hours. Instead, work less of your lunch break, come in a few minutes earlier. But realistically, half an hour earlier, half an hour later would be absolute tops. Don't just go nuts, otherwise, it will get on the nerves of people and it will backfire. If you get through the first week and you've shown that you're a diligent worker, you've been researching the standard operating procedures, and you know exactly what you're doing, congratulations. You're probably going to be staying there quite a bit longer.

Conclusion

In closing, make sure that you have a great resume that's short, concise, and to the point. Interview and be honest with how you're interviewing. It's a great idea to make sure that you actually research the company that you're working for. That will show that you are interested in them as well. When you first get there for work, show that you are genuine and you are an overachiever, but don't take that to the next level. I hope this has been helpful!

You might be feeling blue, but today we're going to be talking about how to feel green and do business sustainably. If you're a millennial, a lot of you are minimalists and you might already be doing a lot of things in a green way without thinking about it, and minimising your carbon footprint from your efforts. If you've been in business for a while though, maybe you're still wearing your suspenders to hold your pants up and you're looking up people's names in the yellow pages and white pages! If so, there's a steep road ahead here, but we're going to start small and go from there. Know that every single step is going to be ultimately bettering your position and making your business more environmentally sustainable.

Electricity Use

So, one of the first things that we did in business as a company that predominately sells digital items or services is that we realised we will be a big electricity user. So, we wanted to offset that, but we wanted to start small first. So, we changed every light throughout all of the offices, from CCFLs (or fluorescent tubes as they're more commonly known) to smart LED lighting. With smart lighting you can get a 60-watt output with an 11 to a 15-watt bulb, and you can have them so they're automatically controlled by timers or from your phone or other tech devices, such as an Alexa unit or Google Home.  You can have all of these lights turn on and off at certain times. It saves you a lot of time, a lot of hassle, and you have the lights go instantly on. So, if you're in a manufacturing environment, or anywhere where there are high bay lights, you will be used to waiting for those suckers to heat up to get to full warmth. You know that if they turn off instantly, waiting for them to turn down before you turn them back on is vital so that you're not shortening the life of their bulbs significantly. Well, those days are over as you can replace all of those with smart LEDs as well.

CCFLs VS LEDs

That is great for your electricity bill, because if we look at the CCFLs versus LEDs, LEDs use less power, last for longer, allows you to change the temperature of the light, and you can change them to more than 16 million colour options. You can change the warmth of the office lights so they're not as harsh in areas where you might be reading and they are very sharp in areas such as your high bay lighting systems. They are going to save you thousands of dollars if you're in a manufacturing environment. When you have to get a crane to get the lights down and change the lights, you can be talking $300 or more to have a light bulb changed out. The LEDs last for 20,000 hours, turn instantly on and instantly off, and they draw significantly less power. With all the different smarts that have been put into them now they are really cool stuff. You can make a full C-Bus style system significantly cheaper without having the know-how. Depending on the size of your business, obviously, your mileage varies, but LED lighting saves a lot of money short-term and longterm after the initial investment.

Remove the Paper Trail

Now that we've got the lighting under control, let's look at your paper trail. So many companies print out an invoice for this and an invoice for that, and give it across to the bookkeeper or the client for whatever the situation might be. There's all this paper handling, and that's a problem for several reasons. You've got all these big heavy printers that need maintenance, the cost of the paper, cost of the toner and the storage costs. If you've got a business that runs predominately on paper, you're going to have lots of filing systems and filing cabinets, and even if you've got a great system for storing everything, that's still a lot of real estate that can be used for better things. So, converting everything across to a digital format, even if you continue using the paper-based mentality and you print to PDF, share files through Dropbox will significantly drop down the amount of paper that you use.

Banish the Filing Cabinet!

I've been in business now for 11 years, and in the 11 years that I've been in business, I've got one and a half filing cabinets full of stuff. Yep, that's everything. As you know, I don't even need to be keeping it for that long. When I fill up the next half, I'll then consider going through and clearing it down to the seven years that you need to be keeping. That is where businesses should be at. You shouldn't need to have a big paper trail. Get your bills delivered to you digitally. Most, if not all bookkeepers and accountants are accepting them like that now, so there's no reason that you should be having a paper statement sent to you, costing that company greenhouse taxes. Instead, think of it as a whole thing when you're trying to save and become more green aware. If you look at it as a big picture, you'll be able to help all the businesses out, minimise your amount of paper, minimise the amount of storage, minimise everything!

Hardware

Now that we've removed paper and the lights that you needed to read it, the next step is to move on to the hardware that you use within your business. A lot of businesses have computers, nearly every business relies upon them to survive. Nearly every business has computers running every day and night but they don't need to be. You should be able to get your IT company to show you a report that shows exactly how much electricity each of your systems is using. Now, depending on the level of expertise that you're dealing with might depend on the amount of data they're going to be able to give you. But, for instance, with our systems, we're able to show exactly how many dollars it's costing you for each of your systems, and we can then set up different policies to make sure that all of your computers turn off at a certain time, and then they turn back on automatically the following morning. We put this in place as a trial run at a school with Education Queensland. This saved them $450 a week in electricity by turning their computers off at 6:00 PM,  which is when all their alarms turned on. Everything turned back on at 6:00 AM in the staff rooms and 7:30 in the classrooms. That meant the computers were ready to be used while saving them $450 a week, which is just a ridiculous amount of money when you think about that. They were not being used and they were just sitting there, churning power. Silly, silly stuff. That is a really smart, simple way to save electricity. It all compounds, even if you've got a smaller office, that'll all compound and you'll save money pretty easily.

Time For An Extreme Step!

The next step is getting pretty extreme. As I said at the start, we have a lot of infrastructure and data centres throughout Australia. The way we've offset that is by putting killer solar systems on the roof. We've got huge amounts of power that we're able to export, and we're talking megawatts a month. Not only are we just exporting that power, but we are also storing that electricity within batteries. We've got battery banks that weigh tonnes and tonnes to support the power that we require of an evening to support all the different hardware that we have in place. This is a bit extreme and the set up does cost quite a bit of capital initially, but then you're not paying for electricity onwards from there. If you're thinking green about it, you don't even need to have the panels on the roof of wherever your business is. You might be in a retail environment in the middle of a store in a shopping centre. You can't just chuck some panels up there. But if you know that you've put panels on your home, you can then know that you are offsetting your electricity and you're stilling doing the best thing that you can be doing for the environment.

Closing Thoughts

So, in closing, check out your light bulbs, change them across, even if you're doing it in phases. If you've got big high bay arrangements, you might not want to have the full initial cost of everything up front. But start to change your lights across. Minimise the number of paper requirements that you have in your business. Maximise the efficiency of your workstations and any of the equipment that can be turned on and off on a schedule. Then, look to storage and electricity alternatives that will save you a bunch of money. Hope this has been of help, and you all stay go

When I became single, I decided it was time to get fit. Being the geek that I am, I had to get some sort of gadget to help. So I bought one of those fitness bands, you know, the ones that count your steps. At the end of the first day, I'd run off my feet at work, but I still only managed to get to 3000 steps. Which is much better than the thousand that I would normally get if I was just sitting at the computer, but either way, it didn't seem like a whole lot to me.

Time to do it!

So I swore to myself that I would do better. For the next two weeks, I made much, much more effort in my fitness challenge. I walked to see people in the office, rather than call. I would carry my shopping home by foot rather than drive. The next time that I checked, I'd gone over 10000 steps a day. I was stoked! Despite this, I hadn't lost any weight but I was eating the same diet at this stage.

Oh Dear.

That's when I realised my big mistake. For the next two weeks, I wore the tracker on my left wrist, and the numbers went back down to 5000. The only thing I was going to lose is my eye site if it's true what they told me as a teenage boy. What I learned from the fitness band is data doesn't mean anything without context. It's very easy to misinterpret if you're not careful.

Set Goals

So, if you're looking to get yourself a fitness tracker, or get something to shoot you in the right direction of where you want to be, make sure that you have your goals in mind and you have them set out. Understand the data before you start looking at calories and thinking about how many you're burning. You need to make sure you're still burning more than what you're putting into your body. When you first step out and you start looking into fitness trackers, set realistic goals. Maybe start with 10000 steps a day, depending on your fitness level. Maybe if you're over 65, 5000 steps day would be a good place to start. It would be better to talk to someone who is a fitness professional about exactly what your benchmarks should be, but don't overdo it.

Are Fitness Trackers Worth It?

So, overall I found that the trackers are fantastic. They are a really good motivational tool as long as you get one that has great battery life, and you get one that's going to mix in with your lifestyle. The tracker that I went for allowed for it to integrate into my business and into my home. An example of this is where if I was to be woken up in the middle of the night, I was able to have the light to turn on as I'm walking over to the toilet, which is fantastic. Those aspects are important to me as well as tracking sleep because I strongly believe the quality of your sleep is by far the benchmark as to the quality you're going to be having the following day. That was important for me.

Other Tracker Features

Some of the other cool things you can with trackers are the options to read your SMS's, see your social media post updates and other things like that. For me, all those things are a hindrance in your performance and ability at work. They're going to be interrupting you and interrupting your day and interrupting your sleep. If it's on your wrist when you're sleeping you will flick it across and see that there's been a post update. That's a problem. You also want to make sure that fitness tracker you're getting either has a minimal display or the display allows for you to get rid of any blue hues and blue tones out of the screen. Your body naturally reacts to those colors and tone and they make you become more awake, as opposed to the yellow tones and red tones.

In Summary

I definitely found that when you look at different fitness trackers that are out there, you do get what you pay for. You want to make sure that you're getting one that has long battery life and fantastic waterproof abilities. If you are a social media person, maybe you're going to love seeing status updates, twitter alerts or Instagram likes. For me, I find it an absolute hindrance, but generally speaking, I think that they're a huge help as long as you're using them the right way. You're measuring your calorie intake, measuring your calorie burning, and going from there. Hope this has been helpful.

A few short years ago, I weighed 38 kilos more than I weigh now. I started researching a lot to try and work out how to lose that weight. First off, I started exercising more, drinking more water and analysing the quality of my sleep. I went into a lot of detail looking at my health, what I'm putting into my body and what I'm expecting to get out of my body. The things that I found were very interesting. I found for myself that cutting back on the amount of meat and carbohydrates that I was consuming allowed for me to very, very quickly over a period of around 10 days cut down the amount of sleep that I needed. I was originally using an alarm to wake up every morning and that was what I've become used to doing.

Starting to Feel Better

When I started going to the gym, I felt well. According to all the experts, to have your muscles synthesise and grow at night, you need to make sure that you're getting a certain amount of sleep. What I found was that as I cut down on my meat intake, I required less and less sleep. Originally I didn't actually try to find this. At the time I had eczema and I was looking at different things that might be reacting with this condition. When I cut down on meat, I was anticipating that maybe one of the preservatives found in meat may have increased my eczema. When I cut down on meat, I thought that I was going to have less of a problem with my eczema. More interestingly, what I found is that I required less and less sleep.

Eating Less Meat Helped Me

Now, I'm not saying by any stretch of the imagination that we should all just be vegetarians. All sorts of people require different diets for different reasons. What I will say though is when I ate less meat, I found myself to be able to think significantly clearer and I was able to sleep less, which means I was getting more stuff done. I was feeling very alive, very awake. Meat in nature is very acidic. All animal products are very acidic actually, so you need to make sure you're cutting down on the number of acidic things that you're popping into your body. As I said, I'm not saying we should all eat no meat.

My Diet

I adhere to what's called the macrobiotic diet. This is a very interesting diet that allows for you to have a small number of animal products and a small amount of alcohol, but it's very much based around the yin yang balanced diet where you are having more raw fruit and vegetables than anything else. One of the great things about eating a lot of vegetables is if you look at how many calories all the vegetables have (excluding high starch ones such as corn and potatoes)  you can eat kilos upon kilos upon kilos every day and still be a deficit in your calories. This means you can be fully highly nutritious in what you're eating.

Embrace the Good Food!

You can be completely comfortable knowing that the calories that you're consuming are fantastic good calories that are high in fibre. I can honestly say you'll find yourself getting sick of eating because you'll be eating so much food. Unlike other diets which try and restrict you, if you just change what you're eating as opposed to the quantities that you're eating and limiting yourself, you'll find food and fruit will start tasting better. You'll be able to really tell the difference between a good quality carrot and a bad quality carrot, and you'll be able to really appreciate that. Maybe ever so often you go out for a naughty meal and you eat something that you shouldn't have. It will taste significantly different. You'll feel that if you like an oily chip from McDonald's or something like that, you'll feel your mouth get covered in oil nearly instantly as soon as you pop it in your mouth. So disgusting. But, we all have these naughty meals and the whole idea behind the macrobiotic diet is it's not a diet where you're a vegetarian. It's not a diet where you're a carnivorous meat eater. It's a balanced diet that works for everyone and it works for humanity.

Think Back

If you think about what we would have been doing a few thousand years ago when we're looking into different foods that we're eating, we were harvesting things. Back then you would think, "Okay. I am going to hunt and get whatever I can for my family so that we can eat and survive." If you were able to take down some large animal and you bought that back to your village, you'd be eating that animal, but you didn't have any way to refrigerate it. You didn't have any way to keep that animal from spoiling, so you'd have to eat a whole bunch of it or spread it amongst a lot of people, which wasn't really a done thing. You'd be eating a whole bunch of it all at once, and you went to a lot of effort to capture that animal.

Now, the amount of effort you had to go through to eat a carrot, lettuce or some berries that are just sitting there growing in the ground is significantly less. It made sense from an energy perspective to have a diet that was higher in grown fruits and vegetables than it was in meat. That's again where it all comes down to, just having a balance in your life.

Try Meat Replacement Foods

When you think about meat, nearly always meat has herbs and dressings and sauces that are derived from different fruits and vegetables and herbs. When you think you're dressing up the meat to make it taste like something else, maybe just try having something else in place of the meat. A good way to segue across would be a product called Quorn. This brand makes food that resembles meat type products that are derived from the mushroom family. That allows for you to still have substitute meat while you're in the transitional phase, or if you are a fan of mock meats.

Embrace the Veg Life

Any way you do it, think about reducing your meat intake, reducing your salt intake, and increasing your vegetables. You'll find you'll feel better than you've ever felt before. Believe me. I got an extra five hours a day where I was able to be productive. Embrace the veg!

Let's talk about project management software. Now, if you're not familiar with what it this is software that's going to make managing anything in your business a little bit easier. As soon as your business has more than one person, or you're doing work for more than one client, you're going to find that project management software is going to make your life a lot easier. In its most basic form, it's a list of different tasks. For instance, we have a service board for Dorks Delivered when any service requests come in from clients that give us just a small amount of information as to what their problem is. Maybe they've got a problem with their emails not coming through, and they'll just send through a support request either via call or via a different email account saying that "We are having problems with our emails. Please, can you check into this?" Now from that though, it could evolve into a much larger thing and it becomes a bit hard to manage.

Why It's Great

Imagine that comes through and the first person in your business has a look at that and says, "all right, I can probably have a look at solving this." They realise that it's a bit out of there comfortability, and so they jump across after diagnosing it for a little while. They realise, "okay, I can diagnosis this enough to know that I can't do it, but I know who to pass that on to," and they might make a small list of tasks that then need to be passed on to different people. Maybe someone needs to look at the hosting stuff and they don't have permission to do that. Maybe someone else needs to look at their server or internet connection provider to have them do something. Project management software allows you to manage and collaborate with many people. It's great for all different types of businesses, not just IT.

Easier to Manage Tricky Issues

If you've got a mowing business and you know that once every three months you go across and dethatch the lawn, it's good to know within this software when that needs to occur. You can use it to able to plan out your days and plan out your weeks for the different jobs that you're doing. This can really help if there are any unforeseen issues, so you can make sure that if there is rain, you know who's being delayed, who your priority clients are, and making sure that you get your deliverables out in time. That's what it's all about. It's about just managing your time.

Software Features

A lot of the software gives you really cool stuff like Gantt charts, so if there's an element of your project that is being delayed, it will allow for you to see what trickle on effects it has. In the situation of building a house, maybe if it's pouring down with rain that then means that there are certain aspects that can still continue in parallel as they would have, but then there are others that are going to be delayed until that rain stops. Project management software is fantastic, and there are lots of different tools out there.

Recommended Software

Internally, we use a product called ConnectWise, but there's also another product that we use for some of the other stuff called Trello. Trello is a fantastic entry point into the world of project management software. Starting at zero dollars a month you can't really go wrong with what it's offering and it's a very powerful tool. You can use Trello for a number of different things. It could be just to manage your marketing efforts so that you know when to release different posts on Facebook or to manage blogs that you might be releasing regularly. The only things that I think that you could have in the paid version of Trello that you don't get in the free version is some of the more pretty detailed reporting and some of the collaboration tools.  You have to upgrade to be able to get these abilities to join into other software, but generally speaking, it is a fantastic piece of kit and something that everyone should be looking into and using it.

Conclusion

Those are my thought at the moment on project management software. Using this technology will be of great benefit to yourself and your business. Give it a go!

So your employer has let you work from home and now you're wondering “how do you stay secure?” There's more and more employees that are working from home nowadays and it's becoming the norm. I personally think is fantastic because it's lowering the amount of cars that we have on the roads during peak times, which is a huge problem. You go along and there's five cars each with one person in them, instead of one car with five people in. There are more traffic and greenhouse gas emissions for no reason. Anyway, that's another story. What we're going to be doing today is discussing how to stay secure from both a business perspective, as well as from the freelancer remote workers perspective. Let's start with the freelancer.

For a freelancer to stay secure you need to make sure you've got fantastic anti-virus software. You need to make sure that you've got daily onsite incremental backups. Now when I talk about anti-virus software, I'm talking you're spending at least $100 a year on that anti-virus, any less than that is a waste of money and isn't going to be doing you any justice.

Once you've got your anti-virus in place it is a great idea to get some anti-malware as well. We use Malwarebytes and we find that it's fantastic. The professional version is definitely what you'd be wanting buy. Depending on the way that your environment's set-up, this might be something where your company is paying for these pieces of software and they're even managing them remotely, or it might be something where you're having to fork out a few dollars.  Either way, there are definitely two tools that you have to make sure you have.

The tools that we use for anti-virus are upwards to $250 to $300 a year and we find that they're fantastic. Despite this, make sure to backup anyway. You want to make sure that your systems are working. If someone sends you a job to do and you don't have your system available, that is 100% dead time for you. You need to make sure that they are fully available, so having a daily incremental backup system is a must. Systems such as Acronis or StorageCraft will allow your system to back up, give you an alert if it didn't work and will sit unnoticed and backup each day. Whether it be every four hours or every 24 hours, they will keep you up and running and some give you some continuity with your deliverables.

Now that the software bits are out of the way its time for the network stuff. If your business is dealing with stuff that is confidential or could be misused in the wrong hands, it'd be a good idea to set-up what's called a VPN or a Virtual Private Network. This acts like a direct cord that connects from your office straight to your machine at home. You can do things such as share things, do printout in their office, send files across to your computer and you can see any of the shared drives that you would have at work while you're at home. Having a VPN is a business by a business case, but it'd be a sensible idea if you're in any sort of corporate entity, dealing with confidential documents or if you're dealing with anything that is sensitive in nature.

Now your work is secure with anti-virus, anti-malware, backup, and a direct connection, but you still want to make sure that anyone that's using this machine is only using it for work. If you have one of the kids jump onto it and they go to a site that they shouldn't, (such as a teenage boy checking out online gambling, they wouldn't be looking at anything else would they) you could be in trouble. If a dodgy site has an infection, there is a chance that it could flow through to your work, and that is not good for you.  Make sure you're not doing anything dodgy or untoward on that system. That is now what we'll call the business system. Don't do anything else besides business on it.

It's even a sensible idea to make sure that other machines on your network don’t have viruses. Some can broadcast over the network and if your PC gets it won’t end well, so it's good to make sure that your computer is isolated. You can isolate your computer quite easy with a thing called VLAN.  This might sound a technical now, but you can set-up it up so you have several different routers that go in a waterfall arrangement. This means that only specific computers can access certain devices. A local IT company that is managing your business should be able to jump in and help you get this set remotely and give you some more guidance.

Now let's jump onto the business perspective side. When you've got a new person connecting in and they're connecting in remotely, you want to make sure that they are secure, and you want to make sure that the information they're getting is only the information that they need. If they are to get infected, you're going to be up shit creek. Why? Well, you’re going to be stuffed if something happens on your work network, so make sure that you are protecting your digital assets. This is very important. You can do that through group policies in active directory, as well as making sure that remote workers are only accessing exactly what they need. Keeping daily backups of any of the files that they have access to will also keep you protected should something go wrong.

If your routers and network equipment are able to monitor when they connect in, you will be able to see the sessions that they have open. You can also have it set up so that when they authenticate they have to use multiple forms of authentication. This is called two-factor authentication. To do this they will have a password from their head, as well as a randomly generated code on their mobile phone. When they connect it locks them in so you will know that's definitely the user is connecting to your network.

Finally, now that you’ve got a layer of security on the network, as well as some analytics to be able to see what's going on, the next thing that you want to put in place is the ability to ensure the integrity of the work that they are doing. You need to be able to make sure they are reaching the benchmark against your current internal employees. There's lots of different screen capturing tools out there. They can give you a summary and audit trail of what they've been doing. This will give you an idea that they are as productive at home, if not more productive than they are when they're in the office. My personal opinion and what I've seen time and time again is that along as you've got the right employee, they are always more productive when no-ones in the office. This isn’t a situation that can comfortably occur, so I find the next best thing is that when they work in their home office. Here they will become more productive than when they're surrounded by lots of people and lots of distractions.

I've got another podcast on that that you can look to about this topic, but the short of it is that working from home is a great situation. Get your employees working from home and secure. Reduce your carbon footprint. Be the person that's doing something for the environment, make it happen!