Every­one wants to be more effi­cient, pro­duc­tive, and suc­cess­ful. We’re con­stantly seek­ing advice on Life­hacker. We grav­i­tate toward any post enti­tled “How to …” or “Top tips to …” And we’re feed­ing self-help book pub­lish­ers who dom­i­nate 25 per­cent of the pub­lish­ing market.

Rarely, though, do we get an oppor­tu­nity to see one per­son or one orga­ni­za­tion com­pletely open up the kimono and show us step by step how they deploy all of these time and cost sav­ing tech­niques to actu­ally run their business.

Stephen Jag­ger

Last week, Stephen Jag­ger (@sjagger), CEO of Uber­tor (web pages for real estate pro­fes­sion­als), Reachd (web mar­ket­ing train­ing courses) and Out­sourc­ing Things Done (high level vir­tual assis­tants), spoke to a group of entre­pre­neurs of the San Fran­cisco Entre­pre­neurs Orga­ni­za­tion (EO) at Samovar Tea House at the Metreon in San Fran­cisco. Here’s a sum­mary of his pre­sen­ta­tion in which he talks about each of the tools he uses and pro­vides an expla­na­tion of the value it brings to his business.

While I had used all but one tech­nol­ogy Jag­ger men­tioned, it was really eye open­ing to see an orga­ni­za­tion deploy all of these tools and demon­strate the busi­ness value they pro­vided in terms of con­nec­tiv­ity, pro­duc­tiv­ity, and cost savings.

Step one: Lose the offices — Jag­ger used to have office space that his com­pa­nies were spend­ing thou­sands of dol­lars a month to main­tain. An oppor­tu­nity arose where some­one wanted to take over their lease. Instead of search­ing for some new office space, Jag­ger and team all decided to go vir­tual. While they saved a for­tune on rent and main­te­nance, they needed to adopt some Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies in order to stay in touch and con­duct business.

Web 2.0 tools for run­ning your business

Mes­sag­ing: Google Mail for busi­ness — For only $50 a year per user, Jag­ger moved all their mes­sag­ing over to the Google Mail hosted plat­form. They still main­tain their busi­ness email addresses (not gmail.com addresses) and spam is vir­tu­ally nil. No need to main­tain an Exchange server.

Office meet­ings and col­lab­o­ra­tion: Google Talk — Instant mes­sag­ing and video chat fea­tures allow Jagger’s employ­ees to still enjoy real time col­lab­o­ra­tion, office meet­ings, and water cooler talk.

Phones: Google Voice (for­merly Grand­Cen­tral) — A free vir­tual PBX (pri­vate branch exchange or tele­phone exchange) to man­age all phones no mat­ter if they change or move. Google Voice allows you to get one phone num­ber that you can use to for­ward calls to any num­ber. Since Google pur­chased Grand­Cen­tral they’ve added tran­scrip­tion of recorded voice mes­sages, con­fer­ence call­ing, SMS, and many more fea­tures. Hear or read voice mes­sages in your email in-box. You can import your con­tact data­base and cre­ate a cus­tomized out­go­ing mes­sage for cer­tain phone num­bers, like really impor­tant clients. By deploy­ing Google Voice, Jag­ger went from 25 busi­ness lines down to zero.

Long dis­tance calls: Skype — Turn an iPod Touch into an iPhone with­out the AT&T monthly charges. Sim­ply load Skype onto a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion iPod Touch or higher. Plug in an iPhone head­set and as long as you’re in a wi-fi hotspot, you can make free-to-cheap local and inter­na­tional calls. This is not the only option for doing this. For more tips and sug­ges­tions, read my arti­cles “How to make free to cheap phone calls” and “Cheap to free phone calls any­where in the world from your mobile phone.”

Man­ag­ing employ­ees: Yam­mer — Jag­ger uses the free ver­sion of this pri­vate busi­ness microblog­ging appli­ca­tion to get his employ­ees to con­stantly be answer­ing the ques­tion “What are you work­ing on?” Look­ing and behav­ing sim­i­lar to Twit­ter, Jag­ger only deploys Yam­mer to his cowork­ers. All con­ver­sa­tions are pri­vate within his group. It’s the employ­ees’ respon­si­bil­ity to update their Yam­mer sta­tus when­ever they switch tasks. In addi­tion, Jag­ger encour­ages col­leagues to admit their mis­takes quickly. That way every­one will know first hand and imme­di­ately the source of a prob­lem. Yam­mer has become an excel­lent employee man­age­ment tool. At any time, wher­ever he is, Jag­ger can flip out his mobile phone or com­puter and get a sta­tus on what every­one is work­ing on.

Mail­ing address: Mail Boxes, Etc. — After an unfor­tu­nate inci­dent where a client showed up at Jagger’s par­ents’ house when he was liv­ing in their base­ment and run­ning his busi­ness, Jag­ger decided it was time to move the com­pany address from mom and dad’s loca­tion. He pur­chased a Mail Boxes, Etc. mail box and paid a lit­tle extra to have it not show a P.O. box num­ber. By keep­ing one mail­ing address (and con­sis­tent phone num­bers through Google Voice) Jag­ger doesn’t have to reprint com­pany sta­tion­ary every time they move.

Timesheets: Slim Timer — Jag­ger uses this tool to look at tasks and roles over time. They see if they’re spend­ing too much time and money on some­thing and whether they need to out­source it or not. For exam­ple, in one case they real­ized they were spend­ing far too much time and money with core resources cre­at­ing hand­writ­ten “Thank you” cards. Not only that, the guy writ­ing them had hor­ri­ble hand­writ­ing. Via Craigslist, they found a woman in Canada with great hand­writ­ing that wrote them all for a cost of $4 per card.

Cus­tomer and sales sup­port: Web­siteAlive — For $40 a month per user they have a chat win­dow on their site to inter­act with peo­ple who have ques­tions and con­cerns. They used to use LivePer­son, but that was cost­ing them $100 a month per user.

Employee man­ual: Google sites — While you can cre­ate a free web­site using Google Sites, Jag­ger uses the tool’s wiki fea­tures to doc­u­ment every sin­gle task at his com­pany, such as the pro­ce­dure for cre­at­ing “Thank you” cards.

Web 2.0 tools for pro­mot­ing your business

Pro­fes­sional growth: Meetup — Jag­ger cre­ates local infor­ma­tional events for the real estate com­mu­nity in bars all across the U.S. and Canada. When he goes to new towns where he knows nobody, he holds one of these events and real estate ven­dors come to him. He uses Meetup to man­age invites and RSVPs. Except for a lit­tle time, it costs him noth­ing to pro­duce these events. He holds the meet­ings on slow nights for bars, such as Mon­days or Tues­days. Since he’s bring in crowds on these off nights, bars give over the space for free, some­times even giv­ing Jag­ger free drink tick­ets. He brings in speak­ers and the events are always edu­ca­tional for the real­tors. While he’s just spon­sor­ing the event, Jag­ger inevitably sells a few Uber­tor web accounts to real estate brokers.

Com­pany per­son­al­ity: Blog­ging — Jag­ger uses his com­pany blogs to give his busi­ness and its cor­re­spond­ing web­site a personality.

Fill train­ing classes: Twit­ter — When he’s look­ing for more peo­ple to join a meetup or a train­ing class, a few tweets usu­ally does the trick.

Pro­mote events: Face­book — Want to know how much fun you missed at the last event? Jag­ger uploads pho­tos from past mee­tups onto Facebook.

Video: YouTube and The Flip — For a lit­tle video pro­mo­tion, a Flip cam­era and host­ing on YouTube is all Jag­ger needs.

Track suc­cess: Google Ana­lyt­ics — Know how suc­cess­ful all your pro­mo­tional efforts are.

Do you use any other Web 2.0 tools to run your busi­ness? Which ones do you use and how have you found it valu­able to you in terms of pro­duc­tiv­ity and cost savings?

BONUS: For all you entre­pre­neurs and peo­ple who work for your­self, here’s a video inter­view I did with my friend and Mac guru, Andy Ihnatko, about the ben­e­fits of work­ing for yourself.

Check out more videos of me and Andy.David Spark helps busi­nesses grow by devel­op­ing thought lead­er­ship through sto­ry­telling and cov­er­ing live events at Spark Media Solu­tions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen reg­u­larly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvo­rak, and KQED in San Fran­cisco. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact David, or leave a com­ment below.

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