Outsourcing our Document Management Needs
Posted by Mel on October 21, 2009
One of the most earth shattering things that I learned early on in my entrepreneurial career is that I couldn’t do everything myself. It is one of those common pitfalls most business owners fall into – you want to be superman, when really you just can’t effectively run your business if you do that. It was a hard lesson, but a valuable one to learn.
So when it came to deciding what to ask the document management software vendors what I needed, it was really only going to come down to one thing: I didn’t want to have to do all the work myself. I was sure that someone would have a document imaging service that could handle converting all of our paper documents to a digital format without us using our time to do it.
After talking to a number of companies about my needs, I was able to find one that seemed to be able to meet my needs without costing an arm and a leg. Money wasn’t a big concern, but at the same time, I didn’t want to pay more than I needed for the service.
Over the course of a weekend, they were able to scan all of our business documents and port them to a digital format. Not only am I looking forward to being able to search on the information, but I also like the fact that we will be a little more environmentally friendly. Now, all we have to do is train the staff on the new system and we will be ready to go – that will take about a week or so.
When my boyfriend’s small business started to run into some problems with storage space, he wasn’t sure what to do. I came in and immediately I could see what the problem was: there were filing cabinets everywhere. And where there weren’t filing cabinets there were bookshelves overflowing with paper and loose file folders. There was hardly room in the office for desks and chairs.