MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS FROM YOUR SMART PHONE

Manage your business, from your smart phone!
Have you ever thought why your phone is called smart? It’s because it can help you manage your business at a very low cost.
Below are some basic tips:

1. Calendar:

• Schedule your appointments: keeping them in mind might fail you sometimes.
• Set reminders: to be always on time, because this is an essential key to success.
• Invite people: to avoid them forgetting your meeting. The reminder will ring on both of your mobiles.
• Recurrent items: save time by putting the event once and set the options of having it appear every time you need it. For example, if you have a weekly meeting with the team, you can schedule it once and let it appear every week on your calendar. In the notes section, you can put agenda of the meeting.
• Then afterwards, you can use the same area for detailing the minutes of the meeting.
• Mix personal with business: many people tend to have a separate calendar for their personal life. But what if you have a meeting with a client that could overlap with your doctor’s appointment or your child’s activity.

2. Contacts:

• Put all your contacts in one place to have them always available.
• When people call you, you can answer by saying their name. They will simply love it.
• Categorize the contacts: clients, suppliers, family, friends, etc. This will help you better find them and better customize your greeting’s messages.
• If you know the birthday of your contacts, you can put it in the birthday section. It will automatically give you a reminder on the calendar the same day every year. Remember them on that special day and they will remember you for the rest of the year…
• Share contacts whenever needed with your team or with clients. Always have full contact details entered. Business cards are obsolete in case you don’t have them in a digital copy…

3. Email:

• No need to explain a lot here but make sure that your email is accessible all the time. You can choose when to answer or not and when to turn off notifications to stop interruptions.
• Use a smart email signature that includes all your contact details. This will help people better find you and remember you.
• Link the signature to your website or even to your social media. This is a smart marketing tool.
• Don’t always count on the email. Use it for reference but always remember that we live in a culture that still loves a call and a personal meeting…
• Even if you make a conversation over the phone, send an email to keep a reference for the call.

4. Documents:

• We live in a world that is so fast that you might need to use a document on the go. Saving your important documents on the cloud is very essential in that regard.
• You can use your mobile ap: Camscanner and then upload the documents to Google drive or Dropbox.
• This will help you better find them and share them with the right people.
• You may choose to share a folder or a file. You may also specify if they can only view, comment or even edit the file.

5. Other important applications:

• Use the camera to shoot, post to social media and market yourself smartly on the go. Make sure you have a phone with a good resolution of the cam.
• Use an application like Buffer to post once but share to multiple social media platforms. You can also schedule the post at your preferred timing.
• Use GPS or Google maps to show you the directions for your meetings. If it’s not 100% accurate, at least it will drive you somewhere near…
• Send your location by Whatsapp to other people. It will save you a lot of time to show them where you will meet. You can also use this technique to save the location of a certain client so that next time you won’t forget where it is…
• In the calendar, put the weather option on so that if you have a business trip, it will automatically update you on the weather status and help you pack the convenient clothes accordingly.
• Use Skype for overseas meetings. It is very reliable and you can also share documents and see the person over the video. This is very helpful especially in recruitment meetings or if your clients need you urgently while you are on a business trip.
• Income vs expenses is a great ap for managing your cash flow. You can categorize your income, your expenses, see monthly reports and even budget for the future. Very practical ap for Android users. As for Apple users, there are plenty of similar aps such as Money Control.
• Mindmapping tools can help you better organize your thoughts, take minutes of the meetings and plan important events. They are easy to use and will help you better remember the details visually.
• Flashlight: in a country where the basic infrastructure is not yet available, such a simple ap can help you tremendously ;)

In a world full of fast pace, tremendous changes and completely unexpected events, it is always recommended to be highly mobile, extremely flexible and always ready to adapt.

Who is smarter you or your mobile?

Jade William Dagher
SME Business Strategist
+961-4-977355
+961-70-226969
[email protected]
www.expand-mena.com