Are you working in the global marketplace?

It may not always seem like it, but the internet moves at the speed of light. The major connections between servers, and between countries, are mostly fibre-optic. Your emails, web clicks and downloads are carried around the world at incredibly high speed. So high that it’s faster than the signals moving around inside your brain.
The speed of light in a vacuum is almost 300,000,000 miles/second. That’s three hundred million meters per second. Nothing can move faster – it’s the universal speed limit. The speed of light in a fibre-optic internet cable is slower, by around 40 percent. Still, it can get around the world four and a half times in just a second.
This means that as far as the internet is concerned, nowhere is far away. You might be based on the opposite side of the planet to some of your potential customers, but in internet terms they’re right next door. In fact, they’re standing next to you. Go on, shake hands.

The world is getting smaller

And there are more of them every day. Ever more people are being connected, with better internet access coming to remote areas as well as cities. Whether by cable, mobile phone, high-altitude drone or balloon, the internet is reaching places it could never reach before.
Now look at your business. Where is your energy focused? Where do you direct all your attention? Are you looking at this vast global marketplace, or are you concentrating on your local customers?
Many of today’s entrepreneurs grew up in an era when the internet was slow and unreliable. Some of us grew up in a time when there was no internet at all! As a friend of mine is still fond of saying, “I remember the internet when it was just fields.”
But things have changed, and they continue to change – very quickly. Unfortunately our minds don’t always change fast enough to keep up. Some of us are stuck in a slower, more parochial past. We need to wake up, and fast.

Global marketplace means global competition

As I sit at my desk here in New Zealand, I’m about 12,000 miles away from some of my clients. But in real terms I’m one-third of a second away. That’s how long it would take email, instant messaging or video-conferencing to go from here to there. It’s a meaninglessly small duration. I truly work in a global marketplace.
That’s all very well, but there’s a sting in the tail. If I have global customers, I also have global competitors. And probably so do you. As Intel’s Andy Grove once put it, “If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry.”
It’s happening now. Long established business models are being overturned overnight. Don’t believe me? Ask a taxi driver about Uber, or a book publisher about Amazon. The age of your business is no defence. If you can’t adapt, you will be swept away by the tide.
What does this mean for you? It means that you don’t really have a choice. The global marketplace isn’t just a nice option – it’s a fact of life. There are people all over the world chasing business. Your business.
The only exceptions are those companies that can’t export their products or services. For example, you can’t easily cut someone’s hair from another country, or sell them freshly baked bread. Having said that, I wouldn’t bet against either of those things happening in the future.
For now, hairdressers, bakers and similar businesses don’t have to worry too much. The rest of us, though, had better stay on our toes. The fields were concreted over years ago.
If you still think your business can succeed by focusing solely on your local market, you could be in for a nasty shock. And wherever in the world that shock originates, it could arrive on your doorstep in less than one-third of a second.

Why you need online accounting

Peace of mind

I don’t want to scare you, but all it takes is one office disaster and your files are compromised. A dodgy employee, fire, flood or break-in and you’ve got a problem. Hard copies of old accounts are often irreplaceable, and a lot of the time businesses don’t fully recover from disasters for this reason.
Using online accounting gives your business access to the latest software and data security that’s safer than the lock on your front door. Simple as that.

Incredible convenience

Having the books in the cloud means our accountant can log in to her work without coming into the office. We can keep a finger on the pulse with staff raising invoices and expenses as they need to. It also lets everyone run project numbers when they’re on the road.
Being able to check accounts and invoices from anywhere is invaluable for businesses that aren’t office based like tradies and others on the road all the time. It’s like having an office in the palm of your hand.
In my small business, Xero automatically imports information from our bank accounts. This means there’s no need to manually reconcile accounts aor for hard copy statements. The latest transactions are categorised, bills are scheduled, and time sheets, inventory and customer relationship management are easily tracked. It’s made a world of difference to our systems.
And it works the other way too. We can easily pay bills online and store any receipts in the cloud.
I used to get an outstanding debtors list printed for me at the end of each week, but now I can log in and check up on client accounts whenever I want.

Time and cost savings

Online accounting obviously means saving on paper, printing expenses and storage costs. There’s also the time saving of not having to sift through reams of paper.
Unlike the old days of expensive software packages, there’s no big capital outlay required for this convenience.
This more streamlined, accessible system means the dreaded two-hour sit down on a Sunday night to tackle the accounts no longer exists. This is a huge change from the world of accounting when I started in business.
Creating new quotes, copying previous quotes, and turning them into invoices has all been streamlined. This means the process is fast and crystal clear from the beginning, something all businesses will be happy to hear.

Work-life balance

Despite the belief that being able to work from anywhere means it’s harder to switch off, I find it allows me to be more productive in those previously unworkable pockets of time. Even five or ten minutes sitting in a taxi or waiting for a meeting can be used productively.