Ever wonder how other FreshBooks customers run a business? Customer portraits connect you with your fellow FreshBooks peers to share guidance and inspiration.

After learning her trade in some of London’s leading agencies, Audrey Mason, owner of Mantra Copywriting, decided to go out on her own. Almost a decade on and business is booming. In fact, she barely has time to market herself because of all the work that keeps coming in. What’s her secret? Delivering great work, especially when she helps a brand shape their tone of voice.

Please tell us a little bit about your business:

Audrey Mason:  My core business is copywriting. I write everything from magazines to websites, advertising to press ads and social media updates. I also do some tone of voice consulting. I’ll go into new businesses, usually, and smaller businesses, and help them find a unique tone of voice and language platform. Aside from that, I do conceptual work, working with designers or art directors coming up with ideas for ad campaigns. I write for larger clients as well, such as Vodafone, Hilton and Citibank.

Tell me a little bit, just for the uninitiated, what do you mean by tone of voice? What do you do for a company starting out or a company looking for some help?

AM: Every successful brand has a specific, established tone of voice. They speak to their audience in a very similar way all of the time. Smaller businesses typically don’t have that, thus creating a lack of consistency. If they have a number of people producing communications for them, they might have inconsistency in their language, and that can be quite confusing for the consumer.

What I do is go in and say “OK, here are your brand values, and based on these values, here’s a language platform, this is how you can sound.” I help them understand what might make them sound unique in contrast to their competitors. We usually start out by giving them an example and asking “are you a brand who might use humor? Do you sound warm, do you sound formal, do you sound informal?” It’s about giving them a set of loose guidelines from which they can produce their communications. That’s really the part of my job that I love.

Here in the UK, I guess Innocent was the first brand to come out with a very unique, humorous, warm and lighthearted, human tone of voice. Of course nowadays, everybody you speak to wants to sound like Innocent. A big part of my job is convincing companies that they can’t all sound like Innocent. I really believe that Innocent’s tone of voice is a huge part of what’s made them so successful. Really, their product wasn’t that different to their competitors – but their brand and tonality was totally unique.

My aim to help find companies something that’s as effective and stands out.

What are the elements of Innocent’s tone of voice that really makes them stand out and makes them different from their competitors?

AM: I’m going to say this applies to FreshBooks too. I think for Innocent, they were one of the first to be a bit risky, use humor and say things that you wouldn’t expect. To this day, you always find something on Innocent packaging that you wouldn’t expect to be there, something very different from the bog standard packaging copy you see every day.

I think FreshBooks does it particularly well too. There you are typing up an invoice and you see something flashing up on your screen that surprises you, or makes you smile. And that makes you feel good about the brand.

Why did you decide to go out on your own?

AM: Flexibility. I worked within agencies in Glasgow and London for about 8 years. Then I had took a long overdue gap year when I was 30 and went traveling around the world. When I came back, I decided that I still wanted that freedom. I thought OK, how can I make this happen? I decided to set up my own business, and I actually ran my business from India for a few years, before finally coming back home and setting up my office in Glasgow.

What’s been one of the biggest surprises so far being out on your own?

I think one of the biggest surprises is the fact that I’ve never actively marketed my business. My website went live last week, and I’ve been going since 2003 on my own. What surprised me most is that the contacts you make in your career can often sustain you, and certainly that’s the case for me, as pretty much all of my work comes through word of mouth. If you deliver for people, and you do a good job, I think word of mouth can carry you.

It’s a really interesting one, because people talk so much about social media these days. “You must be on Twitter, you must be on Facebook, you must have a website, you must have it optimized for search engines.” Actually, one of the biggest surprises for me is in a lot of cases, actually, if you’re good at what you do, and you provide a good service, you’re always busy.

What’s your secret for such continued success?

AM: To always do what you say you’re going to do, and always deliver on time. I think in this job, detail’s really important. Never do sloppy work, deliver when you say you will. Do little things extra for your client. I think in this climate, that’s really important. I’ve got clients that I do monthly campaigns for, and quite often they’ll say, “Audrey, I’ve got 100 words to write for a brochure, and they want it today.” I’ll do it for them and I’ll do it for free, because it’s something that will take me 10 minutes, whereas it might take them hours. Do little extra things that don’t cost you a lot, but mean a lot to your clients.

I think always be positive as well. I try, even if a job gets tricky – and it happens – to always positive, and to find solutions, and to remember that not everybody can do what you do. Where it’s a simple fix, make it simple and don’t over complicate things for people.

Ever wonder how other FreshBooks customers run a business and do what they love? Customer portraits connect you with your fellow FreshBooks peers to share guidance and inspiration.

David Cohen knows how to provide great technical support. He started Memphis-based DCo Solutions from his kitchen table with his last $300 in savings. What began as an idea to provide remote technical support on the side has become a successful company that works with small to medium-sized businesses, and even some top-fifty universities.

Remote tech support is a faster way to troubleshoot problems and DCo Solutions can connect to virtually any computer in the world to fix software-based problems (even at the bottom of the sea! Alright, this photo wasn’t from a job-site, but David is often seen giving the a-OK to projects!). We caught up with David to learn more about how he started his own business.

How did you come about starting DCo Solutions?

Before this I was working at big box stores, doing their tech support or selling computers.  Although it was fun, the money wasn’t there and it wasn’t very fulfilling.  I had the idea of trying to do some remote support on the side, so I bought some software to get started. Now the business has grown, and provides services such as managed and unmanaged support for small and medium sized businesses, web design and a few web properties.

What do you love about running your own business?

I get to see my clients happy. If a price is wrong, then I can change it; something I could never do while working at a big box store.  Not having anyone to answer to is the biggest plus I can have. In cases where something doesn’t go as planned, I can make things right without having to pitch it to two or three managers.

What are some challenges that you have come across? 

Things like billing and taxes were way more of a chore than I would have thought them to be. Sure, Freshbooks helps out a TON, but I never imagined how many expenses and how much paperwork go into running your own business.  Also, being able to slack off directly impacted the size of my wallet, so to speak. Since I didn’t have a set schedule, I found myself taking more days off in the beginning. Realizing that bills don’t pay themselves, I have little to no time off now, but I love it!

What do you hope will happen with your business?

I’d love to grow and expand to another city. Maybe that’s just an excuse for me to move, though!

What advice can you offer other small business owners just starting out? 

Keep at it! Do what you love and the money will come.

Ever wonder how other FreshBooks customers run a business and do what they love? Customer portraits connect you with your fellow FreshBooks peers to share guidance and inspiration.

Social Strata is a social content technology company, powering big brands like Mattel, The Discovery Channel and thousands of other sites.  Their online community software aims to bring that great energy from social media home to your website and add life to it!

Today, the co-founder and president, Rosemary O’Neill, along with the Chief Operating Officer, Lori Hope, share their thoughts on how a successful tech company still prides itself on taking care of its customers.

What’s a typical day at your company?

Rosemary:  I focus heavily on marketing and social media on a day to day basis.  If you peeked in on Social Strata on a typical day, you’d find our development team discussing the latest upgrades to the application and several of us diving into the support forums helping customers.  Our operations team makes sure the data center is humming along, and several others mixing it up in the social whirl (on Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc.).

Lori: I’m the Chief Operating Officer, which means that I handle the financial and day to day operations.  Adding onto what Rosemary has said, you can also find us participating in video chats between the West Coast office and the East Coast office. We still like to hang out together, and video chats are often more efficient and rewarding than email.

What do you love about your job?

Rosemary:  I absolutely love meeting new people every day, talking to our customers and helping them make the most of our technology. I pinch myself that I get to represent our mission out there on the web, evangelizing the online community everywhere.

Lori: I enjoy talking to customers, but I LOVE helping someone realize the potential of community, and helping them to solve a problem or improve something on their site.  And, I just got back from a vacation where I happened to meet someone who uses our product! (I’ll also confess that I love crunching numbers!)

Did you do something similar before this?

Rosemary:  My background is corporate marketing, so I made a huge leap joining my husband, the other co-founder and CEO, in building a software company.  However, I think the love of learning and connecting with people definitely translates, particularly since we are in the “connection” business.

Lori:  I actually came from a background of shopping center management, so nothing could be more different from me. But, I came because I wanted to learn new stuff, and that’s what I get to do here, every day!

Were there big surprises in running your own business?

Rosemary:  Yes, I would compare it to the reality check you get when you first move out of your parents’ house—toilet paper doesn’t magically appear, and you have to kill your own spiders. There are so many aspects to running a business that it can be a big culture shock to realize that you are now responsible for all of them. (Which is one reason we hired Lori Hope very early on.)

Lori:  Yes…I remember specifically the office space where I found myself on the roof, changing the HVAC filter….

What the positives and negatives of being your own boss?

Rosemary: On the positive side, I get to do amazing things like surprise everyone with policy changes like unlimited paid leave. I love having the freedom to create a great working environment. On the negative side, when things fall short, the buck stops here. That sometimes means dealing with customers who are unhappy, or having to let staff go.  That’s never easy, regardless of the reason.

What advice do you have for small biz owners just starting out?

Rosemary:  I’d say try to keep room for your friends and family; they are the ones who will still be there if things don’t work out with your business, and they’ll be there to celebrate when you do succeed. Also, treat your customers the same way you’d want to be treated.  One happy customer can be the equivalent of a huge marketing and sales team, if you give them the tools to spread the word!

Lori: Remember the importance of your customers and do your very best for them everyday. Also, make sure that your business methods reflect your principles: we value integrity, innovation and persistence, and we strive to have that shine through.

What is the one thing you’d love to do or happen with your business?

Rosemary:  We’ve had so many adventures over the last 14 years! However, I’d love to someday see a WSJ (Wall Street Journal) profile…if only to see what my husband’s head would look like in black and white pixels!

Lori:  I’d also like to see the WSJ profile…but I’d also like to see WSJ using our software!

Welcome to the FreshBooks Tax Thursdays series! We know a lot of small businesses struggle with taxes, so we’re hoping to help make it a little easier by featuring advice from leading accounting professionals every second Thursday.

With the tax deadline now passed and the season winding down, many are celebrating the end of stress and panic over getting their taxes filed on time. While personal taxes are a pain, for small businesses, tax time can be an absolute nightmare, costing entrepreneurs energy, money and worst of all, time deterred from profitable business pursuits. Filing past the deadline can be extremely hazardous to small businesses; it may cause them to be flagged for a potential audit or incur heavy late fees, potentially costing them a substantial amount of money that could have otherwise been saved.

Even though next year’s taxes are likely the last thing anyone wants to think about right now, being proactive now can make for smooth sailing through tax season. Understandably, small business owners would much rather expend their efforts on billable time than on administrative tasks, so there are many financial benefits to getting accounting matters automated and organized early.Small business owners need not fear the taxman, as long as they are organized, prepared, and follow Freshbooks’ 7 summer tax tips for small businesses to stay on track and save money:

1. Be Structure-Savvy: The way a business is registered dictates that company’s tax structure.  With varying business types and subsequently, varying tax benefits and consequences, understanding their company’s structure will allow small business owners to develop a logical and effective tax savings plan. (The IRS website has many free resources available to make sure businesses are in compliance.)

2. Don’t be a shmuck – deduct: Expenses that reduce the total taxable income of a company can be deducted at year-end. Any business-related expenses that are relevant to the operation and betterment of the company, such as office furniture, can be written off, amounting to significant potential savings.

3. Start saving for retirement: Contributions to an IRS-approved Independent Retirement Account (IRA) can be written off, reducing a company’s total income subject to taxation, enabling owners to benefit from money that would otherwise be sent off to the IRS.

4. Get your head IN the clouds!:  Small business owners are increasingly switching from desktop-based financial software to cloud-based solutions. Cloud systems are based online and offer small businesses access to their financial records anywhere on a browser by an authorized individual. Some are even compatible with smart phones, allowing easy access on-the-go. Taking advantage of modern cloud-based accounting services can make it easy to keep books up-to-date throughout the year, helping small business owners to sail through tax season.

5. Consistency is key: Based on a company’s tax bracket, small business owners can determine the amount of tax a company should be paying on a monthly basis. By making consistent monthly deposits of that amount into a savings account designated specifically for taxes, owners can ensure their final tax bill will be covered at year-end.

6. Invest the savings, reap the rewards!: The savings contributed to the above-recommended account can be put into low-risk investments, earning interest throughout the course of the year.

7. Credit crunch? Use a card: The IRS now accepts credit card payments, so for businesses faced with more taxes than they prepared for, the difference can be put on credit and paid off in installments like a monthly bill. This debt will accumulate interest, and is therefore best used as a last resort, but is still preferable to incurring late fees or a possible audit.

Should you choose to go this route, make it work to your advantage as much as possible: Use a low-interest credit card, or negotiate a better rate with your card company. If possible, find a card with a great rewards program as well; air mile rewards or cash-back features can be put back into the business, off-setting some of the money lost to interest. Also, for business accounts, the interest can be written off.

Guest author: Pat McCaully

flickr/karen_roe

Our new Now You Know Fridays series scours the Web for the most interesting news in tech to add to your digital biz know-how!

Computer scientists can be competitive. In fact, there is even an annual contest to see who can sort the greatest amount of digital data in the shortest time. The competition is called the Sort Benchmark and it attracts brainiacs from university and industry computer labs around the world. It’s sort of like a digital Olympics where they can flex their mental muscle in a bid to create the fastest data centre designs.

To understand how this affects everyone’s lives, know this: such sorting prowess promises to be key to coming scientific advances. TechNewsWorld reports that IBM is partnering with Dutch scientists to sort data from the world’s biggest and most sensitive radio telescope.

Not only that, making data sort faster has important implications for anyone who has ever plugged a term into a search engine, looked for book or music recommendations online, or tagged a friend on Facebook. How? Because with every increase in sorting power, comes a decrease in search times. And since the idea behind the Sort Benchmark is to use as few resources as possible, the winning designs can also save money.

As Forbes puts it, tech giants such as Google, Yahoo and Twitter “have been able to change consumers’ lives so profoundly only because they’ve built such sophisticated, back-end computing and data-analytic environments that can quickly process and analyze stunning volumes of data: searches, tweets and other content running through their sites each day.”

In 2010, UC San Diego computer scientists broke the terabyte barrier by sorting more than one terabyte of data in just 60 seconds (that’s 1,000 gigabytes or 1 million megabytes). They also sorted one trillion data records in 172 minutes – tying the previous record, but doing it with four times fewer computing resources.

“If a major corporation wants to run a query across all of their page views or products sold, that can require a sort across a multi-petabyte dataset and one that is growing by many gigabytes every day,” said UC San Diego computer science professor Amin Vahdat, who led the project. “Companies are pushing the limit on how much data they can sort, and how fast.”

According to The Future of Things, the UC San Diego record is especially significant because the technology can be applied to almost all platforms.

Talk about going for gold.

Spring is in the air! And we’ve been doing some spring cleaning. This got us thinking what does your creative space look like? Is it your local coffee shop? Is it your home office? Is it your artist studio downtown? Take a picture and enter our creative workspace contest!  The winner will be featured on our blog and win a $250 gift certificate to Etsy.

Here’s how it works:

1. Email a picture of your inspiring workspace to newsletter@freshbooks.com
2. FreshBooks will upload the pictures to our dedicated Creative Workspaces pinboard on Pinterest
3. Get Likin’! Vote for your favorite workspace by “liking” the picture on Pinterest (tell your Mom, friends and coworkers to vote for your workspace as well!)
4. From now until May 1st at 5:00pm EST we’ll pick the picture with the most likes and the winner will be featured on our blog and receive a $250 Etsy gift card!

Rules and regulations

By submitting your photos for entry, you agree that FreshBooks can use these photos in the promotion of the most inspiring workspace contest. In addition, you agree to participate in an interview and have the office photographed for use by FreshBooks. After all of the submissions are collected, we will place them on a Pinterest inboard and Pinterest users can vote by liking their favorite workspaces. Entries are accepted from April 25, 2012 through 12 midnight ET on May 1, 2012. Voting (“liking”) on Pinterest will begin on April 26, 2012 and end on May 1, 2012. We will announce the winner on Facebook and Twitter on May 2, 2012.

We know running your own business is hard work. And it might be causing you to be putting off a much-needed getaway or maybe an attempt to try working from a more scenic location (is the Lake District, Scottish Highlands, or Snowdonia calling your name?) Whatever the reason, we can help get you there! Enter our contest to win a round trip train ticket for two within the UK!

Leave a comment below describing what you can do with the time FreshBooks saves you? We’ll choose a random winner, so tell us what you like to do when you’re not working hard for clients or on your business.

Contest Rules

• UK-based entrants only
• Reimbursable train ticket limit of £250
• Deadline for submissions is 9pm BST May 1, 2012
• Only one entry per business please

Managing expenses in FreshBooks is easier than ever: You can now choose to attach receipt images to your invoices!

Why is this a good thing? Well firstly, if you re-bill your expenses to your clients, they can see those expense receipts attached right to your invoice (no separate approval process required). Also, your receipts are backed up, organized by expense/project/client, and all in one place–no scraps of paper floating around everywhere!

If you’re not already using FreshBooks to manage expenses, this is a great time to try it out. Here’s how:

1) When logging an expense in FreshBooks, you’ll now see a link to upload a photo or scan of your expense receipt (in .png, .jpg and .gif file format). Of course, you can still add expenses without uploading a file, too.

2) When you generate an invoice and choose to include your expenses assigned to your Project, your receipts automatically get added to your invoice. To leave off the receipts (or expenses altogether), use the Edit Invoice screen to set your preferences.

3) Here’s what your client will see when they view the invoice:

• If viewing the invoice online, they can click a link below the invoice to see the receipt
• If viewing the invoice as a PDF, the image of each receipt is displayed on a page
• If receiving the invoice via Snail Mail, each receipt gets printed on its own dedicated page and included in the envelope with the invoice.

Bonus! A thumbnail of your receipt will appear when you mouse over the image links:

We’re betting that a client will be mighty impressed to receive their expense receipts as neatly organized digital files – and that those clients will be inclined to hit “pay now” even sooner. Give it a try!

The Fresh Ideas video series connects you with entrepreneurs, thought leaders and smarty-pants. Share this Fresh Idea today!

Kicking off our Fresh Ideas video series is an interview with award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg. We were thrilled to get a chance to catch up with him given that he’s in the spotlight these days since publishing his new book The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business (Random House 2012). He’s become an expert on how to understand the process of habit change and and how to be more productive (and happy) in work and life. We’ve become neurology nerds ever since learning which habits are crucial to success.

If your desk is getting cluttered with stacks of receipts, fear not UK FreshBooks users! Receipt Bank will organise your receipts and import them into your FreshBooks account as expenses, saving you a lot of time. All you need to do is collect all your receipts, then just mail them to Receipt Bank using their Freepost receipt bags (UK only). You can also scan or take a picture of them, then just email to Receipt Bank.

Peter, a consultant and Receipt Bank user, says it best on the Receipt Bank blog:

It has freed up more time to spend with my family.

Previously, my process for staying on top of my finances was laborious and very much out of date. I would have piles of receipts and once a month my wife and I would spend an age going through everything. My accountant would be on my back. Now the stress has gone.

Receipt Bank removes the problem. Receipts go straight from my wallet into an envelope, before ending up in the postbox. I use the smartphone and email forwarding features, but my favourite by far is the envelopes – it’s a very civilized thing to do.

I heard of Receipt Bank through FreshBooks, who I use for my billing. Once I got used to it, it was so straight forward – my receipts now move automatically into FreshBooks.

It has saved me lots of time. Typically I would do this outside of work hours, so it has freed up more time to spend with my family. I can’t really measure the value of Receipt Bank in pounds and pence.

If you want take some of your time back, learn more about Receipt Bank on their FreshBooks add-ons page.

Re-posted from the Receipt Bank blog.