Times are not changing. Times have changed. If you hit your stride 20 years ago and are doing just fine with your Dewey decimal filing system and your computer with a 3.5” floppy drive, and are not amused by Surface Pros and Twitter accounts, there are more reasons to incorporate technology than being more efficient. Your clients, especially new and potential clients, are going to expect you to be tech savvy.

 

Take a look at this article from Fortune Magazine about how 70% of big businesses will support the transition to paperless if they are not there already. Or this article about how 60% of Fortune 500 companies are using electronic signatures to boost productivity, while you are printing, signing, faxing, waiting for a fax confirmation sheet, and filing away the fax confirmation sheet. Last month, the United States Department of Defense entered into a $145 million contract with Adobe to use its document cloud, creative cloud, and experience manager forms software – all tools for automating paperless document processes. In short, the world is already on board and they will respect you more if you are too because it shows that (1) you work efficiently and (2) you will be able to work efficiently with them when they send you an FTP link or a Dropbox link to transfer files instead of having to deal with FedExing or faxing or sending by courier.

What You Can Do

Take some time this year to do a tech audit of your office. Look at how you are storing files, how you are marketing yourself, and what kind of a first impression you are making on sophisticated clients who are probably years ahead of you in technology. If you can’t do it yourself, get some outside help. Not only will you make a better first impression, but you’ll work more efficiently too.

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