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My husband and I have recently shifted to the country from suburban life.  It’s still a suburb of Melbourne but an outer suburb amongst the hills and bushland. It’s beautiful and we look forward to many years here as we head towards retirement and grand-parenthood.

While I do run a virtual online business of my own, I find it’s still important to maintain contact with local business operators. There are just some things that need to be done on a local basis.  And it’s a great way to get to know the locals and let them know I exist too.

I woke up in the morning realising I hadn’t yet seen a local newspaper so when I went to the post office on my daily trek to the shopping area I noticed some shops had the local paper stuck under their doors. On enquiry I found out where I could get a copy and brought it home to check through the classifieds. (I find it strange thinking about the local paper on the very day it’s become available)

A short time later I had 3 appointments set for the day for a home handyman to do some carpentry, for someone else to come and cut up fallen branches and clear the area at the back of our property and for yet another to regularly mow our very large lawns.

It’s important to support the local business community whenever possible.

Tags: Business Operations, Self-employed, Work From Home by Kathie Thomas
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I received two of these letters this past week and was shocked to receive bills I wasn’t expecting. They were for my trademarks and I couldn’t recall having to pay bills of that size before. It worried me and was unplanned/unexpected.

Needless to say, research online shows that there are warnings about these letters which are not official.  Below is a link from a legal organisation and the other is ‘hidden’ information I found on the website of the organisation that sent the letters.  I say ‘hidden’ because that page is not linked in their menus and not visible on the site – I only found it through a Google search.

http://www.holdingredlich.com.au/urgent-alert-warning-to-trade-mark-owners

This information is on the Trademark Publisher website but is a hidden page in that it’s not listed on their menu.

INFORMATION ABOUT TRADEMARK PUBLISHER (TMP) – DATABASE SERVICE:
THE TMP WEBSITE WWW.TRADEMARKPUBLISHER.INFO DISPLAYS THE TRADEMARK, THE NAME OF THE TRADEMARK OWNER, THE NAME OF THE ASSOCIATED BRAND AND PRODUCT/SERVICE ON THE INTERNET. IT IS ONLY AVILAIBLE TO PAID, REGISTERED TRADE NAMES AND DESIGNS WITH THEIR IP AUSTRALIA REGISTRATION NUMBERS AND CLASSES. PUBLICATION ON THE TMP INFO REGISTER PROVIDES WORLDWIDE PUBLICATION ON THE INTERNET. THIS PUBLICATION IS AN ELECTIVE SERVICE AND DOES NOT SUBSTITUTE FOR REGISTRATION, NOR DOES IT PROLONG THE VALIDITY OF YOUR TRADEMARK REGISTRATION WITH IP AUSTRALIA.

Tags: Business Operations, Warnings by Kathie Thomas
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Picture this scene.

You’re busy concentrating on something in the office or perhaps having a conversation with someone, but only half concentrating as you’re dialling a phone number to make a call.  The phone rings a couple of times, it’s answered and you finish the conversation you were having with the other person, or perhaps finish your train of thinking and then realise that there is a beep and you were listening (well, only half listening) to a voicemail message.  You leave your message and hang up.

A couple of days pass and you realise that person hasn’t returned your call.  How rude.  So you shoot them an email (or DM them via Twitter) and ask them if they got your message?

Their response is they didn’t.  The person you were calling checks their phone logs or voicemail and there is no message from you.  What did actually happen?

Chances are you rang a wrong or old number but because you weren’t listening to what took place at the other end after it stopped ringing you can’t even be sure who was on the voicemail message or if it was a blanket recorded message used by Telco services.

Ever happened to you?  mmm, thought so. I believe this happens to too many people and it’s a sign of busy-ness and trying to get several things done at once. Trouble is we end up causing delays for ourselves simply because we weren’t paying attention at the time we made the original call.

So, what are you going to do on your next phone call?  Listen did you say?  Thought so.

Tags: Author's Thoughts, Business Operations by Kathie Thomas
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Recently a client has been having challenges with their Outlook file and then they sent me an image of a message they’d received because Outlook had stopped working.  The pst file was over the size limit.

I had explained previously the importance of deleting from the Sent folder, archiving regularly and generally maintaining the file but I guess it’s something that just isn’t thought about regularly and in fact, not until it crashes.

Unfortunately Outlook does have file limitations (you can’t let it go on forever) and whilst some say that 2gig is the recommended size I encourage people to consider keeping it at 1gig or less.

I restart a new pst file at the beginning of every year. Quite easy really. I rename the outlook.pst file to the year it’s for, i.e. outlook2008.pst (when Outlook is closed) and then when Outlook re-opens it will automatically recreate outlook.pst because it can’t find the other file.  You can then use the import/export function to import your contacts list and any other folders you created which need to be kept.  But don’t import the whole old file – otherwise you’re back where you were before.

This article at Microsoft will give you more information should you need to do further exploration.

Tags: Business Operations, Working Online by Kathie Thomas
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