Despite times being tough Toni and I have been going through a small period of equipment upgrades.

We’ve purchased a new specialised printer … we purchased some new cameras and lenses … we’ve done some direct marketing for Toni’s business and we’ve even hooked up some new secondary hosting with an upstream provider.

We always knew that a shopping list like that would set us back a reasonable sum of money and the temptation was there to make our purchases based on price alone. Why spend over a thousand dollars on a new digital SLR camera and telephoto lens when you can buy a digital camera for less than $100?

Why buy a digital SLR camera when you can buy a non-SLR digital camera that comes with more bells and whistles and costs around half the price?

Why buy a printer for nearly $300 when you buy them down at Office Works for less than $50.00?

Of course it all comes down to what you want to use the equipment for. The $500.00 non-SLR camera may have had more bells and whistles than the camera we bought but the one we bought is far easier to use and produces a much better result that we could have achieved with the cheaper camera.

The $300.00 printer does more than just print A4 pages and that extra capability was what we wanted in the printer we were shopping for.

In both cases we could have spent a lot less than we did but it would have been false savings. The cheap printers and cameras that were available didn’t do what we wanted them to do so we would have been wasting money rather saving it if we had chosen those cheap options.

And that’s the way you have to look at things when you’re a small business and you’re looking at buying equipment. Forget about the price point and buy what will work for your business … if you’re a bit strapped for cash then don’t make the purchase.

It’s far better to go without for some period of time than wasting what money you have on something that isn’t going to do the job.

You should always buy what fits your need … you should never buy something simply because it is the cheapest option.

Just recently I did a comparison piece on small vans for small businesses over on AussieMotoring.com and it showed up the same principle.

One van was several thousand dollars cheaper … and on the surface that seemed like the obvious choice for most small businesses … but when you look beyond the price you see that the cheap van is a little lacking in some areas and may not do the same job as one of the more expensive vans.

These days more and more small businesses are taking their business online. Some are even going so far as to shut down their bricks and mortar stores and concentrate solely on selling online.

Actually succeeding online can be quite a challenging task because suddenly you’re not just competing with other businesses in your own city or town. When you take your business online you’re competing with other like businesses spread around the world and if you want to succeed then you had better know what you’re doing and understand the realities of conducting a business online rather than pinning your hopes on the fantasies that so many people peddle.

Something you see less frequently is a small business that is doing well online and now wants to expand into a shopfront out in the real world. However that’s exactly what one of our clients has done in the last couple of weeks.

Fraser Coast Lawn Bowls came to us late last year and asked us to build an online shop for them and we did and right from the start business was good. The owners used our expertise to market their business online and they used their own expertise to market the store offline and business has been very good.

Now they’re taking their business out into the real world with their own shopfront and even in these hard times business is looking good there too.

So don’t limit yourself to running a business online … there are plenty of businesses that should do just as well offline as they do online and maybe your small business is one of them.