You Know Where to Find Me - planning a home-business or small-business move - Industry Trend or Event

Home Office Computing, Jan, 2000 by Jeffery D. Zbar

Survive contact information upheavals with your business intact

WHOEVER SAID, "THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, the more they stay the same," never ran a home office. Whether you're an entrepreneur, freelance or contract-based worker, or work remotely full or part time for a firm someplace else, your contact information is your lifeline to clients, vendors, partners, and coworkers. Change it, and you'll render entries in hundreds of Rolodexes and Palm organizers obsolete. A simple change of address or phone number can snowball into a loss of business, or even call your professionalism or your company's stability into question. At the very least, it can annoy and inconvenience the very people with whom you've worked hard to establish relationships.

Like many home-based workers, Marilyn Milne has dealt with changes of all kinds. Over the past seven years, the Eugene, Ore.-based business owner has renamed her marketing communications firm and added new telephone and fax lines, e-mail addresses, and a P.O. box. On top of that, her phone company has changed her area code.

How has Milne managed to keep her business on track and growing? By approaching each change "as a twofold communications challenge" that involves "getting the word out" and ensuring that her "communications methods operate without glitches," she says. To help you develop your own strategies for surviving professional change, we've gleaned tips and advice from experts, home workers like Milne, and personal experience.

Leaving a Trail

"Managing change is in large part managing behavior," says Joyce Graff, a vice president of the Gartner Group research firm in Stamford, Conn. "You have to plan ahead, [but] human behavior is that we don't," she explains. "We don't react until we have a problem in our face."

To compensate, Graft recommends a mix of personal actions and high-tech tools. She says it's important to anticipate changes, moves, or disruptions in service or connectivity. For instance, if your e-mail address will change, "keep the old account [active] for a couple of months' overlap," she suggests. As soon as you know your new address or other information, print it on business cards and hand them out "so you don't just drop off the face of the earth."

Graff also suggests employing a "follow me" phone service, such as AT&T's Personal Reach Service, which lets you give contacts and clients a toll-free number that rings up to three numbers (such as your old and new numbers and your cell phone) simultaneously. Another choice is V-Link, which combines voice mail, a toll-free number, follow-me access to five telephone numbers, plus inbound fax into an integrated tool accessible from any phone. (See the sidebar "The Price of Staying in Touch "for pricing details.)

Regardless of the services you choose, you should plan for change, advises Debbie Gilster, owner of Organize & Computerize, a business organizational consultancy in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Gilster suggests you collect your contacts with Symantec's Act, Microsoft Outlook, or another personal information manager (PIM), and master the program's broadcast e-mail and fax functions. Create inexpensive postcards or flyers announcing the change; if you've moved, include scanned images of your new workspace or home office. Above all, she says, be proactive to maintain professionalism: "Don't wait for others to make the communication move. You need to do it first."

When Milne changed her company name, she says she created an all-in-one announcement and mailed it "to everyone we'd ever met." Each recipient also received new business and Rolodex cards, as well as a pencil on which Milne had imprinted the phrase, "Erase us from your minds/ Pencil us in."

For more minor changes, Milne gets the word out via her company newsletter, and sends letters and e-mail messages to her key contacts. Even the area code change was seamless, she says--the phone company provided warning to local customers leading up to the change and a recorded announcement alerting callers from outside the region for a year afterward. "The grace period reminded most people to update their auto-dialers or reprogram their telephone systems," she says.

Sea of Change

By her own reckoning, Karen Bowman is a pro at handling changes to her Pompano, Fla., public relations and marketing firm. She's moved three times, and survived an area code change from 305 to 954--which, because it lacks the usual 1 or 0 in the middle, confused callers early on, she admits.

With each change, Bowman writes a simple notice and blasts it out via Symantec's WinFax Pro to her contact list. And each time her phone number changes, Bowman contracts with her carrier, BellSouth, to keep the old number as a "mailbox in the sky" for several months. Calls dialed to the number are routed to the carrier's Memory Call voice messaging service.

When her new area code threatened to scrap thousands of dollars' worth of stationery, Bowman printed "Please note new area code (954)" on small return address labels and affixed them near the telephone number. "With the right-sized labels, you can place the new information atop the existing return address and phone number," she says.