Real Deal REInvestor Network

People tell me that it seems like I get more done in business than a lot of people, and I think that’s an element of systems, delegation and outsourcing, and technology. Plus, I’m pretty driven. But even if you drive in the slow lane here’s a couple simple tips that can help you pass Gramps who ran off the road on the emergency lane trying to get around your putt-putting along.

Seriously, though, getting things like the two pieces of advice on systems I’m going to teach you here can be a big push towards working more ON your business rather than always just IN your business.

First is Ringcentral which is a business that can provide you with an 800 number and they can direct your phone number anywhere you want it to go based on various rules. For example, if you’re in your office, you can have it ring in your office. If you go out on the road, you can have it go to your cell phone. If you want to be available from 2pm to 5pm and unavailable before and after you can do that, sending callers beforehand to an answering machine that says they can leave a message which you may get and respond to or they can call back between your stated hours of availability for the best chance of reaching you live. You can get your voicemails sent to you as email attachments—or even get them transcribed and read them as text. You can also forward specific extensions to specific people you delegate to based on certain ongoing needs in your business. So you can have several "departments" some of which are never used but when they are it ain’t you getting bothered with the "I can't find the lockbox" question because if someone calls your office and chooses that option you never even find out about it as the system routes that call to the right person on your team who handles that.

Second is fax through email. I hate fax machines but in business some documentation gets done by faxes, that’s just the way it is. I like to tell people to have an efax setup for your business because you need to have a dedicated fax line that is always on when people fax you things—and most home office fax machines don’t have a dedicated line. You don’t want the offer on that property to come in when you are yakking with Aunt Martha, do you? What if they never get an error or re-send?

I use Efax and have also heard OneSuite or works great. Its very reasonable and is always on. Your faxes get emailed to you as a pdf and it’s very easy to use. You can also use this line as a scanner too- just fax stuff to yourself. No muss, no fuss. I like getting faxes in my email because I never lose them. I just set up a filter or rule in my email account to automatically label incoming faxes “Faxes” and then I won’t lose it. Hard to say that about all that paper floating around your house, isn’t it?

Say, what’s the deal? Where IS that awesome recipe for chili you promised to write down and send me anyway? Can you just fax it to my email?