Thinking about where you would go with your business? The place where you are likely to go is nowhere, if you have chosen to remain where you are - in your comfort zone. Stop at what you are doing and look around you. What you see will baffle you. What you will feel is a likely future shock. You would begin to wonder where the world is headed to.

When it comes to business, the Internet is more important than anything else if you need to go anywhere near the ever elusive profitability. It is amazing as to the fact that there are indeed some website development companies that don't have a website to showcase their portfolio yet. There are some hosting sites that have shoddy, badly designed websites put up showing their plans and tariffs. Certainly makes a mark there, don't you think?

Internet is the technology that has dissolved all the geographical boundaries this world had tried to put up. This technology had single-handedly nullified the distances between each and every place humans have inhabited and thereby made the world a really tiny little place. With an abundance of information available at people's fingertips, businesses have been shaken out of their comfort zones. If you enlisted your business profile with BigOtrade, for example, a

prospective buyer in New Zealand is just as far as a buy from your local precincts. On the other hand, Internet has made some businesses more powerful, more responsive, more profitable and far-reaching.If you still open your store every morning thinking about how much you would be able to make, what with all those pending payments, receivables and payables lying about your table; with a zillion operational hurdles right in between you and your customer; sales being made possible only thanks to your ever expensive newspaper ads, a redundant sales force and your company's so-so performance and lastly, your own entrepreneurial blues, vacillating income levels and high stress levels.

It is time you crawl out of the rocks and take a few lessons on doing smart businesses.

The sheer scope of utility of the Internet coupled with the fact that it has the potential to automate your business processes - sales and marketing, billing and enquiry, accounting and cash management, lead generation and customer service - to make your business entirely hands-free. You push the buttons and let the machine do its job.

Think about what such a business model can do to you: automates your lead generation process, sets everything up on a website to enable payments using e-commerce, your auto-responders must be able to ping your client's inbox the moment a sale is made making them believe that you are well behind the email but then, little do they know that you have been sleeping.It is all really a matter of embracing change. To know that all it takes is the ability to take on the new ways of doing things and the willingness to learn. A little bit of reading every day, and then familiarizing yourself with a few technologies, software and services available to make businesses fun to work on is all it takes you to be on the route to an exhilarating trip to business success.It is perhaps time for you to don the role of an active, change agent and inspire leadership within your company. You have to get moving. Get online, or get

eaten up alive by your competition.