Green tuesdays: green business practices

It's easy to talk about using "green business practices" but harder yet to define what that means. Many of our speaking engagements across Seattle cover the basics of green business practices, and no, we don't just mean recycling your office papers! (Although that is a great place to start). A few weeks ago on our Green Tuesday post we wrote about our green floral practices, so today we though we would mention a green practice we use that applies to any business.

The "paperless office" was a term that was thrown around years ago, and finally companies are finding ways to implement ideas that create less paper waste. When I first started Bella Signature Design, our typical design proposal started with me gathering multiple swatches, writing up original and revised proposals on the computer, printing them out and mailing them off to potential clients. I was hesitant to email my proposals, because an emailed document often looks quite differently once it arrives to the recipient if is simply in a Word Processing format. I didn't have the money at the time to invest in some of the excellent, but expensive, software that existed out there at the time, such as Adobe's great PDF writer.

When I made the pledge to really minimize paper in our office, I searched for a less expensive alternative and was delighted to find deskpdf. There are several versions, from $19.95 and up, and I use the least expensive version without any problems or need for more features. If you are not familiar with pdf writers, this great software locks your document so that it looks the same to your recipient than it does in front of you (in nontechnical speak). It makes your documents look polished, and it also does not allow the recipient to change the document, which can be a plus for proposals and invoices.

With such a great, affordable alternative, I no longer have any need to send 'snail mail' copies of my proposal to my clients, unless they request one with their design portfolio. They simply receive a beautiful version in their inbox, without harming a single tree!

(and no, I don't receive any money from deskpdf to write about them!)

Daniela