You may be saying – but I do involve my employees in my business…but do you?

Of course your employees to do the work of the business and the employees, with the right direction, make any business great as it expands, but there are not many business owners that involve their employees in helping with important decisions.

I would suggest that you ask them their opinion on various expansion ideas or where you are looking at introducing new products or services get their input on this.

Also, ask them how to improve on customer service, especially those employees that are on the front line, as it were…as these are the ones that are dealing with the customers directly and are therefore likely to give you some of the best feedback.

Never be scared of getting the opinions of your employees and remember that most people work better with their own ideas than on ideas that have been forced upon them from a-high!

A good way of doing this is to have regular group meetings with your employees…if you are a small business then there is no reason why this could not involve all employees of the business, but you may have to do this after hours otherwise there will be no one to run the business whilst you are all in a meeting. I would suggest putting on some drinks and eats in the meeting and make it fun and enjoyable so that they all enjoy the experience…thereby you will get the best out of them.

If your business is a larger company with too many employees to meet in one sitting, consider breaking this up into smaller meetings and perhaps get someone to volunteer from each group meeting to come forward to meet together to discuss their individual ideas.

The benefit of this system is not only will it produce great ideas to take your business forward, but it will also help to make it more independent of you the business owner.

Last night I was watching a program about how Bill Gates made Microsoft one of the Worlds biggest companies and made him the richest man in the World up until recently.

One aspect that was discussed on this program was the threat that Google poses to Microsoft. Bill Gates seemed to be really nervous about the power of Google and how they are developing their site so that PC users no longer need to buy Microsoft products like Word, Excel and Power Point, etc, as these programs are held on Google’s servers.

Google’s GDrive is a step in the direction that makes Mr Gates Nervous and is an online storage option where Google servers have enough capacity to hold the entire contents of your hard drive. We are all familiar with having a C: drive and a D: drive, so how do you fancy having a G: drive too.

This new service from Google (thought to be launched in 2009) will allow you to access and update your information, including word documents and spreadsheets, your emails, your personal photos etc, just so long as your device has an internet connection. It could also mean that instead of your PC booting up from your hard drive (or your C: drive), it could be booting off the Google operating system.

By shifting pretty much the entire content of a user’s hard drive to Google’s servers, PC’s would become simpler and cheaper. These new devices would simply act as a portal to the web and perhaps we would just need a keyboard that interacts with our television set and nothing more, other than a “local” processor and some RAM memory to work on files locally.

This new form of computing has a new term, which is “cloud computing” on the basis that your information is sitting in “the cloud“.

Of course the benefits of this new system are numerous, one of which is having your data stored in another location or “the cloud”, so if your computer is stolen or if it crashes, then your data is “safe”. The second obvious benefit to businesses is the ability to share information with other users within your business as a large network, using the internet as the network connection.

One thing that you will have to consider is the security of the information held by Google; will you be happy for Google to hold all your data. What about security breaches? Google would have access to all your data files and all the information pertaining to your business! This information could be sitting anywhere in the world too – it might sit in the USA or perhaps in Indian, who knows where?

The only constraint on this service is the bandwidth you have with your Internet Service Provider (ISP), so as long as your service is a fast one then there should be no speed issues. Today the Internet and the connections to it are pretty reliable. However, there are still times when the Internet still goes down, only last week it was reported that Google’s servers in India were down.

In one of my businesses we have been cut-off from Internet connection due to faults on the line, usually a fault with BT. In this event, if all your data is stored remotely, you would not be able to access your files and work would grind to a halt! Is that how you would want your business to run?

Can you also imagine the law suits that would be flying around, should Google lose company data! This could prove to be an interesting dilemma trying to prove that the data was in fact sitting on Google’s servers when it was lost. This could be a lawyers mine field in the future and can you imagine a small business going up against the might of Google, should something go wrong.

As a business owner what do you think about the idea of the Google GDrive? Would you be prepared to trust your hard drive to Google? Please let me have your comments on this below…

If you are a Business Angel or if you have some money to invest then please contact me!

I would like to put together a board of investors “Business Angels” if you like perhaps along the lines of “Dragons Den” whereby they each put up an amount of cash to be held in Escrow and then we invite business owners, budding entrepreneurs and new business owners and inventors to present to the “Investment Board” for investment in their new business.

So if you think you have what it takes – you have some spare cash – please note that the type of investment I am talking about is high risk so the cash we are talking about needs to be money you can afford to lose! However, with a very risky investment the upside can be very high too!

Please contact me on info@in-business.org.uk and let me know your details and we can meet to discuss. I am looking for five investors to begin with so please contact me and I can give you a bit more back ground behind myself.

If you are in the position of wanting to sell you business you will no doubt be aware that there are 1000′s of other businesses on the market so why not try to get to as many people as possible.

If you post the details of your business here on in-business.org.uk it will be free and you never know the buy just might find your details here!

If you wantto remain anonymous to the public and of course to your staff then email us at info@in-business.org.uk and we will hold your details, in confidence, so that potential purchasers can contact us first – the alternative is that you simply set up an anonymous hotmail or yahoo email address and post that on here for people to contact you. Remember hotmail and yahoo email addresses are free – I prefer yahoo becuase they don’t delete your account after 30 days on not visiting the site!

Good luck to those business owners selling their business from in-business.org.uk!

Equally – to investors looking to buy a business please do not hesitate to post your requirements on our website for free too!