From my recent posts, you have probably got the picture by now that my background is automation. I used to work for a very large corporation on the project side, my job was to look at gaps in our processes and boy were there gaps!! and come up with automation solutions for the manual processes. Although this job was probably one of the best schools in the world to learn all about automation, my passion was and still is the small businesses the people who took the initiative, cut the corporate cord and went out on their own.  I have come to know many ex-colleagues who left the corporate life and became freelancers, some went to become freelancer IT consultants, some went to become marketing freelancers, some went to become freelancer project managers . As you probably get the drift, they all took their corporate experience and started working for themselves. The one thing in common was No one has ever looked back…

Now, here we come to the inspiration part, these ex-colleagues of mine, i.e. the new to the market freelancers, were all great friends, we used to go out for a drink occasionally, but since they became freelancers, the ALL started complaining constantly, and they all had the exact same complain! WE DON’T HAVE TIME! I was really puzzled, some of them had only a few clients, so I really couldn’t get why was that, that they didn’t have the time?  As one of them put it, we have to take care of everything now, the clients, the tasks, the phone calls, the invoicing, we basically do several departments used to do for us in the company. and BINGO! having done this automation thing during all my corporate career, I suddenly realised, there wasn’t any reason why we couldn’t do the same for freelancers? Literally build a software from scratch, to automate all the daily to-Dos a freelancer needs to do? And this is what we did. I wouldn’t lie, it took us months to get to the perfect software that answers to what a freelancer needed to do, we went back and forth to the drawing board again and again, added and deleted modules until we felt it was now ready for it’s first test drive..

We gave it to the biggest complainer! Just to stop hearing him constantly moan about his difficult life as a freelancer. Now, don’t get me wrong, this person hated changes and even more hated technology more than anything..so we naturally figured it would be the best test drive we could ever have on the software.

We gave it to him, no charge no obligation, just his honest opinion..and we waited and waited for his comments..but nothing..waited a few more days that turned into weeks and then we called him..Martin? how are you? we asked, I am very very busy he said..Damn..we thought, he obviously hasn’t been using the software at all and we wasted all this time on him..so..we said..you haven’t been using it at all? What do you mean? Martin asked, of course I have, but since I started using it, I got so much work coming I don’t have time to chat or have a drink..

So, we sorted out his work problems..but we still haven’t sorted us his complaints, or managed to go out for a drink!!

Tomorrow, I want to show you the true powers of  iQ Desk, and how it actually transformed the life of a customer of ours, who happens to be a freelancer life coach!.

Yesterday, I told you about a meeting that I attended back then when I was still a hopeful employee in a large corporation. For those of you who have just come across this blog, I will make a long story short by saying that in this very high profile meeting I did the unthinkable and it was to challenge the big executives, which is a complete NoNo in most corporations. My idea to handle high volumes was to automate some of the business, but the executives were all under the agreement that the company should hire more employees instead of automation. In fact, the chairman dismissed the idea completely saying that there was no need to automate anything and everything worked just fine! Well I knew that there were many errors and many problems with all the manual work we had to endure. I even spent nights and weekends along with my other hopeful colleagues to try and cover a fraction of the volumes we had. And guess what? It was only going to get worse much much worse!

The predictions were that volumes were going to double or triple in the next quarter, we were all exhausted by this stage and many people wanted to leave and have a better quality of life for themselves.

Now I am going to tell you what happened next, what made the big executives run like headless chickens one Tuesday morning. So this is what happened….

We had a big client, not only big, but as corporates like to put it , very very Sensitive!! We were all asked to come to a meeting and not disclose the identity of the client, we were asked to give this client the best service we can ever give, treat this client as if our life depended on it.

This client delivered a lot of work on the first day of business with him, we were all so so busy and getting really tired by the end of the day. Remember we were using Word and Excel to document all the transactions? At the end of the day or shall I say late evening, we all went home only to come back the next morning and see all the big executives already sitting in a room with very worried faces!!. Now, you ask what happened?..as faith wanted there was an enormous mess, actually it was one of the worst mistakes ever to have happened and with? you guessed right, with the new super sensitive client. Apparently, one of my colleagues typed in the wrong client details on the word documents and ALL the client’s top secret transactions went out to ANOTHER client..talk about mess, it can’t get bigger than this..

Now, big boys had only one word in their mouths that day, and it was AUTOMATION…

I heard this sentence a few years ago when I was still an employee in a very large corporation. I was sat in a large meeting room, filled with well suited executives. On the meeting agenda was to get suggestions on how the company could cope with higher volumes of transactions. The consensus in the room was that the company needed to hire more employees, train them quickly and get them to turn around the higher volumes.  When the meeting was about to close, I said and I remember my exact words :” Why wont we automate some of the processes, so we will be more efficient and save the new headcount and a lot of time and money?”

There was silence in the room and my direct manager had this look on his face begging me to be quiet, but I kept talking about how easy it was to automate some of the simple daily tasks we had to do on a daily basis, such as To-do lists, sending invoices, clients’ updates and how much time this could save the company. As the employees were using Word and Excel to document all their work and it was all very manual and error prone, I was sure everyone will like the idea and thank me for the enlightenment…..

But guess what? the answer I got from the chairman was :”Why should we automate our business? It seems to work anyway? I didn’t answer, but the realisation came a few days later..

Tomorrow I will discuss why EVERYONE should use business automation and reveal what happened in the company.

Hello all,

Due to a recent request from our clients, we changed the system, so you can now use your own logo as the background and change the colours.  This request came from a small business that wanted to brand iQ Desk with their logo, so it looks impressive when they work with clients.

As always ,we are here to help and improve iQ Desk. We love to hear your feedback and listen to new ways to improve our business management application.

Please contact us if you have a new idea that you think will make iQ Desk better.

We think that iQ Desk can help you run your business, in fact we are quite sure about it because the clients that are already using it keep saying so.

But on top reason our clients like iQ Desk, is the fact that it is a web based business management application. It gives so much flexibility to be able to run your business from anywhere you like.

Just imagine that you are out of your office and you need to check something important about  a specific job. As long as you can find an Internet connection (which is not that difficult these days) you are sorted.

Or imagine that you are meeting a client, you can update the job page together with him while sitting in their office! and then you can even generate an invoice directly from iQ Desk and give it to him.

There are so many scenarios where a web based application helps you. As one of our clients said: “I am so happy that I chose  a web based management system! I really am!”. iQ Desk gives you the freedom to do so.

Hi all,

We are very confident that you will like iQ Desk very much and would like to recommend it to your friends. So we made it easier for you. For each friend that you will referrer to us we will give you £50 cash back as a thank you note.

And you are not limited for the amount you can claim. So if you refer 5 of your friends you will get £250 cash back even that iQ Desk has cost you only £199.

Just send us an email with the name you referred and we will send you the money.

Hi all,

We are proud to announce that iQ Desk version 2.2 is ready. We improved the functionality, the speed and add some new features. One if the most important one is the option to backup the data and restore it from the admin page. The process takes few second and it worth backup the information every day. Just in case.

An email has been sent to our clients how to obtain the upgrade. If for some reason you didn’t get this email, please contact us and we will send you instructions how to update. All the upgrades are free of charge.

For the clients that use our server, the upgrade is automatic. We are working hard on ver 2.3 and it should be ready by the 30/04.

Looking forward to hear your feedback!