As a small business owner I’m often looking for business documents. Over the years we’ve put together an employee handbook, process manuals and confidentiality / non-compete agreements among others. For the most part, we’ve pieced these together from friends who have their own businesses, or by looking for the documents from free or paid online resources.
I recently came across .docstoc.com, which is an incredible resource with hundreds of business documents available for free download. One of the first things I noticed was a confidentiality agreement in the featured documents area. I’ve noted it to check it out later and compare to the one we are already using.
You’ll find Word files, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets and even Power Point presentations. They’ve also got an incredible feature that allows you to mouse over the icon for the document, and view it in it’s entirety without actually opening or downloading the document. In fact, the entire interface they use is incredible. This isn’t some rinky-dink outfit, .docstoc has put in time, effort and money into creating a great platform. A platform both sleek and incredibly user friendly.
After browsing through, I found quite a few documents that were less than useless. That’s the drawback of having an interactive environment where not only can you retrieve documents, you can also upload your own for others to use. But that’s also the beauty of .docstoc. You’re not limited to what a handful of editors make available, you get tons of resources from other business owners and managers as they share their information as well. This PowerPoint of 35 Clever Marketing Ads is case in point.