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Some needs are common to both small and large businesses: mail, fax, phone, and marketing among them. Here are ten low-cost services to save you from having to try to do everything yourself—and keep your business fitting inside your home office.

I’m planning to do a whole separate article about websites for advertising freelance services (and finding contractors to work for you), so I’m not including them in this list.

1. Don’t waste your billable hours standing in line at the post office! Sign up with Stamps.com and print your own postage in any denomination, including Priority Mail, Express Mail, Parcel Post, and International.

2. Set up a conference call for as many participants as you want, whenever you want, for free! Just follow the instructions at freeteleconference.com. No reservations needed. (The conference line is a toll call.) Or host a toll-free teleconference for 12 cents a minute at TWI Budget Conferencing. Teleseminars are a great marketing tool, not to mention a way to extend your consulting services outside your local area.

3. If you need visuals for your presentations but don’t want geographic constraints, try Netspoke, Go to Meeting, and WebEx, which combine phone conferences with live web hookups so you can show your PowerPoint slides.

4. Manage multiple client databases with an online shopping cart system which also handles client follow-up with autoresponders (programs which send messages at set intervals once a client has taken a particular action such as buying a product or signing up for a tips list) and lets you send newsletters and e-zines to up to 10,000 subscribers (like my weekly Backup Reminder Newsletter) at Ecomincs. Their shopping cart is compatible with over 50 different Merchant Service providers.

5. Merchant Services are companies which allow you to accept credit cards. Even if you sell services and not products, you’re probably going to need them. PayPal is one of the most widely accessible and least expensive systems. There’s no charge to set up a business account, but they charge 3% of each credit card transaction. Some people avoid PayPal because of its past security problems. If you’re a Costco member, you can get good rates on NOVA merchant services. (NOVA is one of the country’s 3 top providers of merchant services, not just online but everywhere.) The transaction fee is 1.65%, but there is also a monthly service fee. There are tons of other Merchant Service providers; these days I get more mailers from merchant service companies than from the credit card companies themselves.

6. Now that you’ve decided to add teleseminars and web seminars to your arsenal of marketing tools and/or consulting services, you need to let people know about them. Full Calendar provides event promotion services for the San Francisco, Southern California, Seattle, New York, and Boston metropolitan areas, and also provides a directory of networking and trade associations and event venues. They’ll announce your event to daily and weekly papers, fairs and festivals, event websites, and convention and visitors bureaus for $20.

7. Read your e-mail from anywhere with Mail2Web, a free service which lets you check your POP or IMAP e-mail accounts from any web browser. PC users can also synchronize their e-mail and Outlook data across several machines with BeInSync. The free version limits the number of files you can synchronize; the pro version costs $59.95.

8. If you don’t have room for a fax machine, or don’t want to bother with getting another phone line, get your faxes by e-mail instead with eFax. An eFax number works just like a regular fax number; the person sending the fax will never know the difference. There’s a fee for a number in your own area code, or to send outgoing faxes.

9. Get a personal toll-free number and multi-mailbox online voicemail system for as low as $9.95/month with Freedom Voice. You can even get your voicemail messages e-mailed to you.

10. Send attractively formatted, CAN-SPAM compliant online newsletters with Constant Contact and Topica. Free for lists of under 50 subscribers; monthly charges for larger lists start at $20.

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Most consultants face Scope Creep at one time or another—the client just keeps adding things on to the project without adding on to the fee. Here are a few suggestions from the Bay Area Consultants’ Network meeting on April 22, 2005 for ways to deal with this phenomenon.

• The best thing is to create a clear scope of work in advance— it can be too late if you’re in the middle of the job and have no process for dealing with changes.
• Only work for reasonable clients.
• Back off the emotional reaction and pause to treat it as a selling opportunity: ask the client questions about where they want to go and what else they need and say “This is wonderful–it’s off contract, of course–would you like me to do a proposal?”
• Have coffee and re-negotiate the letter of agreement
• Give every person you’re working with a copy of the contract
• Treat it like a kitchen remodel: her contractor has no problem saying “Do you want that? It’ll cost that much.”
• Negotiate, negotiate—insert a clause saying “Anything outside these specifics is on a time and materials basis” into every contract. Then refer the client to the contract when they ask for more.
• Be very careful about not getting hooked in emotionally to the client’s needs without actually making an agreement about the money
• Think about it from the client’s point of view. Your client is probably too overwhelmed to realize what’s up for you

How do you deal with Scope Creep? Post your suggestions in the comments section or send them to sallie@fileslinger.com

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I’m starting this blog as a repository for all the useful links, interesting products, helpful tips, enlightening events, brilliant books, and great groups that I encounter in my work as a consultant. (It’s also a chance to write about something besides backups.) Expect to see a few FileSlinger™ articles republished in text form and a good many quick reviews.

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