Michael Levitt's Blog, page 73

Functions That Small Growing Business Should Be Outsourcing

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Outsourcing is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your business. It’s a fantastic in-between service that businesses take full advantage of before hiring employees. It gives them plenty of extra manpower to carry out certain business tasks, but the costs are much lower than what you’d expect to pay for a new member of staff.

So here are some of the most common functions that you should be outsourcing if you want to grow your small business.

Sales

Sales is something that can easily be outsourced. While it’s preferable to have an in-house sales team that understands what you’re selling, it’s not a huge deal to outsource this as long as you plan to upgrade to an in-house team soon. External sales services can help you find plenty of customers and clients while you focus on improving your products and services.

Accounting

These days, many businesses use cloud accounting software to help them manage their finances. However, you’re going to need an accountant sooner or later for when your income increases along with the number of transactions. Accountants can also help when it comes to tax-related laws and restrictions and ensures that you’re filling all of your financial responsibilities as a business.

Administrative tasks

Administrative tasks can include a lot of different things. It could mean answering the phone, booking meetings with clients, responding to emails, and so on. Many of these tasks are fairly personal for a business so it doesn’t make much sense to outsource them. However, as you start growing and administrative tasks take more of your time, it can help to offload some of the responsibility by outsourcing them.

Human resources

Human resources is a complicated subject that involves many different functions. From hiring staff members to dealing with internal disputes, you’ll find that your HR department is extremely important for keeping your business operating smoothly. Human resources is something that can be outsourced with help from services like syndeohro.com. However, as with many functions, it’s eventually something that you’ll want to manage in-house if you have big aspirations. But for now, outsourcing human resources as a small business can bridge the gap between a small business and a large corporation.

Marketing

Many people confuse marketing with sales, but in terms of outsourcing, you can think of marketing as the department that thinks up promotional campaigns and designs lots of unique content to draw customers in. Marketing is extremely important for attracting various audiences and is something that you should definitely consider outsourcing unless you already have an in-house marketing team.

Design

When starting a business, you shouldn’t worry too much about how your logo or branding looks because you’re more focused on creating a unique product or service that people want. However, as you grow, it can help to establish a better brand image by redesigning things. From your logo to picking colors that represent your company’s image, there are loads of different ways to express your brand’s personality through design. This is something that can easily be done with the help of outsourcing.

Preventing Burnout In The Warehouse

It Isn't Just The Inside The Matters! Why You need To Make Sure The Outside Of Your Business Looks As Good As The Inside

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In today's competitive market, business owners are under a lot of pressure to provide excellent services and products while also trying to keep their staff happy and productive. While dealing with these responsibilities, it is easy to allow your business's outward condition to slip through the cracks and appear less than perfect.

There are a few easy things you should endeavor to find the time to accomplish, ranging from keeping your windows sparkling clean to keeping your grounds manicured and neat. Whether you hire someone to perform the work for you or you roll up your sleeves and do it yourself, here is why your business needs to look just as good outside as it does inside.

#1 It helps to keep your building and grounds safe and well maintained

By frequently cleaning and inspecting the exterior of your building, you will be far more likely to spot any structural flaws, such as cracks and holes, that require quick care. A fresh coat of paint every now and then adds another layer of protection between the building and the elements like wind, sun, and rain, lowering the risk of damage. It also gives you chance to check over the footpaths and driveways, looking for potholes and cracks that visitors (and employees!) could fall down and injure themselves, or that could damage vehicles entering the site. South Central Sealing & Paving can help with asphalt crack repair.

#2 It shows your customers and clients that you care

Making customers feel welcome is one of the most important things a business can do. A customer will not feel valued or welcome visiting and doing business with a company that allows its entry to become filthy and has litter in its front yard. A clean and well-kept storefront, on the other hand, will make them feel much more cherished and welcomed, and therefore more likely to come in and spend money.

#3 It will bring in new customers

With a clean and neat outside, you will not only make present customers happy, but you will also motivate prospective customers to come in and discover what your business has to offer. People are drawn to buildings that are tidy and well-maintained by instinct. Begin by cleaning your windows, painting your storefront, and picking up any trash that has accumulated.

#4 It is also good for the people who work there

A clean and inviting exterior will make your new and existing customers feel good about doing business with you, and it will have a similar effect on your employees. They will not be beginning their day off in the greatest possible way if they have to go through a filthy, damp, and unwelcoming entrance every day to get to work or parking their car somewhere that feels unsafe and unpleasant. Cleaning up boosts employee morale, which has a direct impact on productivity, profit, and employee attrition.

Maintaining the outside of your business may seem like yet another task to add to your already lengthy to-do list, but it is something that should be done on a regular basis to ensure the greatest perceptions and thoughts of your company.

How To Set Up Delivery Services for Your Restaurant

Businesses can expand their reach to customers when they add delivery services to their restaurants. However, before establishing a delivery system, there are several elements restaurants should consider first. To learn more about how to set up delivery services for your restaurant, continue reading our blog.

Designate Your Delivery Zone

Before your restaurant can begin offering deliveries to customers, a company must identify how far they plan to make deliveries. While it may seem unnecessary to place limitations on how far away customers can order, deliveries from farther locations could ultimately elongate a driver's delivery time and affect other customer's orders.

Instead, if restaurants plan to guarantee fast deliveries, they must designate the region of their delivery zone. Creating these coordinates will ensure that local customers will receive food in a timely matter, and it will encourage more dine-in orders from customers who live out of town.

Invest in a Quality Delivery Van

Without a functioning vehicle, restaurants simply cannot make deliveries. In order to create a successful delivery service, your restaurant must invest in a car that guarantees your drivers can reach customers safely and efficiently.

Although it may be tempting to cut costs by letting employees use their personal vehicles, there are several benefits to purchasing a cargo van for your business instead. For example, there are several different ways to optimize the storage of your van. Additional space in vehicles will allow drivers to deliver more orders with fewer trips. 

Pro Tip: If you're concerned about your employee's delivery performance, cargo vans can be synched with geolocation services, which allow owners to ensure employees are taking an efficient route to customers without unnecessary detours. 

Create a Delivery Station 

It can be challenging for restaurant managers to divide their attention between a new delivery service and dine-in orders. During busy dining hours, it can feel impossible to stay organized between online orders, delivery orders, and dine-in orders. 

Creating a delivery station dedicated to intaking, fulfilling, and preparing orders for delivery is a highly beneficial solution. When restaurants make these designated stations, drivers can grab delivery orders more quickly and reach customers at a consistent pace.

Take-out and dine-in orders will also be more organized, resulting in your delivery service being more successful. 

There are so many advantages to expanding your business past the limitations of a dine-in experience. Review our tips on how to set up a delivery service for your restaurant so you can begin outlining your business plan.

Improve Your Workplace For Your Employees

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Becoming an employer sees you take on a whole lot of responsibility. You become responsible for your employees health, safety and wellbeing in the workplace. One element of this is the space that you provide your employees with to work in. Believe it or not, your decisions when it comes to workplace design can have a huge impact not only on your employees’ happiness, but their productivity too. With vaccines being rolled out around the world and more people heading back into commercial premises rather than working remotely, many of us need to give our workplaces a refresh. Here are some steps that can help you to achieve this.

Ensure the Premises is Up to Scratch

First, you need to check in on your premises and ensure that they are up to scratch. Many have been left abandoned for the past year and a half throughout the pandemic and may need some work carried out on them. If you find that you do require professional services, you may want to take a look at those provided by https://dmi-kc.com/services/mechanical-construction/.

Make Sure There’s Plenty of Natural Light

Believe it or not, natural light can provide your office with way more than just a nice aesthetic. Steering away from artificial blue lights can actually prove essential for your employees’ overall health and wellbeing. Natural light genuinely does boost productivity. Natural light regulates your circadian rhythms, which regulate how your body knows when it’s time to be awake and when it’s time to wind down and sleep. By providing a workspace with plenty of natural light, your employees are likely to perk up during working hours.

Make Sure Everywhere’s Clean and Tidy

Of course, cleanliness is deeply important for any workspace. This is particularly true following a worldwide pandemic. People will want to feel safe and secure in their workspaces and having professional deep cleans carried out can help your employees to rest assured that they’re working in a Covid-safe environment. You may even want to consider anti viral fogging every so often.

Creating Space for Breaks

Work is important. But all work and no play can make your employees feel run down, demotivated and generally negative. So, make sure that you have some nice spaces for your employees to take breaks in. This gives them an opportunity to step away from their desks, recharge and get back to work at full capacity. To encourage people to take the breaks they need, you can set up appealing and comfortable spaces for break time. This could be a break room with sofas and armchairs or beanbags. It could be a kitchen space where they can prepare basic snacks and heat up meals. It could be an outdoor area with benches where they can sit and get some fresh air.

These are just a few suggestions, but they should help get the ball rolling in the right direction. Hopefully, some work well for your company and can significantly benefit your employees.

Your Guide to Customer Success

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A customer-centric approach enables you to focus on providing a positive experience to customers. With this outlook, you drive repeat business, improve business growth, and enhance customer loyalty. A customer-centric company offers a lot more than good customer service. For instance, Zappos and Amazon focus on customer-centric methods to create a friendly environment for customers and fulfill their needs. They commit to delivering genuine customer value. Still, you might wonder how customer-centric your business should be. In a survey, Econsultancy asked what characteristics a business should utilize to establish a digital-native culture. (Source). 58% of respondents answered that the solution lies in developing a customer-centric business.

For instance, in strategies for customer value, you can enable brand loyalty through regular contact. Your approach should involve providing additional benefits such as instructional videos, a free e-book, or insider tips. A customer always wonders how they will benefit in return for keeping in touch with your business. You can satisfy them with the latest promotions and sending emails containing a call-to-action. You can save money and time by engaging loyal customers and a target market instead of wasting your efforts on people that are not interested. Therefore, with proper customer valuation techniques, you can develop a successful relationship and ensure long-term success.

What is Customer Success?

The main focus to implement customer success methods is building a successful partnership with your customers. You will receive positive feedback in exchange for providing additional value on their purchase. Customer success techniques drive and enhance the customer experience to guarantee a successful path for future growth.

Why do Businesses need to focus on Customer Success?

You should understand that your business's success depends on the success of your customers. Your business will only succeed if your customers find your product effective and starts using it. Mainly the customer success is about providing your customers value for using the product. However, you require people, data, and processes to make this possible. Before making a product, you should understand why, when, and how your customer will use the product. 

Customer Success vs. Customer Service vs. Account Management

Primarily, customer success focuses on identifying the meaning of success for your customer. Furthermore, it offers you tools to provide a satisfactory customer journey in which they receive the desired outcome.

Enhancing the focus on client management

Increasing the up-selling opportunities

Providing values and enhancing the user experience

On the other hand, quality customer support will help you consider customers’ needs in every interaction. The techniques for customer support evolve according to the expectations and the growth of customers.

Customer support helps track the customer journey

Providing solutions to customers

Creating a personal relationship between customers and the business

Account management involves collecting data and sharing it with the customer success team so they can provide customers with maximum support on every engagement. It helps:

Grow the business partnership via up-selling and cross-selling.

Managing relationships between customer support, sales, and clients.

Retaining long-term business, providing customer satisfaction, and renewing contracts.

What is Customer Success Management?

Customer success management helps convert sales prospects into active or repetitive product users. Your management team can concentrate on keeping customers on board and developing a close long-term relationship. A customer success management team works as support professionals and salespeople. Customer managers are different from account managers, as they increase customer retention, expand customer accounts, drive customer satisfaction, and solve customer issues.

Customer Success Life Cycle

The process of customer success is evolving. Professionals are consistently introducing new and innovative ways to engage customers. Customer success teams have way better techniques than traditional emails and phone calls. Below, we will discuss the customer success process so you can start interacting with your customer successfully. 

Adoption

In this stage of customer success, the customer starts adapting to your product. It means that your product is now an essential part of your customers’ daily operations and activities. You have to meet your customer’s expectations and provide a positive ROI. After all, when a customer chooses your business, they expect better value over others. You need to understand their expectations and continue to provide value to them.

After they are satisfied with your product, the customer will be ready to up-sell or cross-sell with your brand. They understand how your business can provide maximum benefits, and they continue to purchase from you. However, to hold onto them, you need to make an additional effort so you can provide additional offers and discounts.

Expansion

Companies consider up-selling and cross-selling as a technique to generate more revenue from customers. However, this mode of operation is not suitable in the long run. You need to maintain trust between customers and the brand. Customers can walk out of your business any time. You need to be attentive and focus on enhancing the relationship.

Advocacy

Other than customers’ ratings and reviews, you can utilize retention measures to track loyalty, such as renewal and churn rate. By doing everything right, you will automatically generate renewals and receive the same revenue again. On the other hand, enhancing customer success will eventually provide more revenue.

Tips and Guides to Customer Success

When you provide high-quality products or services to customers and keep them happy, they act as business advocates. Finding a new customer means incurring a greater expense and effort as opposed to satisfying current customers. Here are some valuable tips and guides by experts. These can enable you to follow customer success strategies:

Gather as much information about your ideal customer as you can

Use selective success metrics for tracking the outcome

Identify the clients’ metrics according to their success

Patience is keen when it comes to customer success

Update your products wisely

Educate

Use multiple channels to connect with your customers

Get personal with your customers

Give complete importance to your clients

Provide additional value by enhancing your product

Utilize the customer reviews effectively

Plan a customer-centric strategy

Stay updated with the new trends

Conclusion

Customer success is an interesting domain that requires proactive strategies. It focuses on identifying and providing long-term opportunities to help customers achieve success. You can utilize support tools such as tech solutions and predictive analytics to gather massive valuable data. Customer success has a long way to go as it is emerging. Moreover, you need to be careful about implementing the methods and managing them properly. Customer success not only concentrates on customer satisfaction, churn reduction, and education about the product. Rather, it is about providing complete support to the customers

Best Ways To Reduce Data Center Costs

Operating a data center can be expensive, but you can lower operating costs and raise your overall profitability with a few simple practices. Improper equipment, needless energy costs, and a poor maintenance strategy are often to blame.

Here are the best ways to reduce data center costs.

Improper Equipment

Most data centers are more efficient when at or near capacity. As businesses move data storage to clouds, your center can end up under-utilized. The closer your facility is to complete capacity, the more efficient your equipment will operate. Shutting down some infrastructure and relocating the loads can help with your maintenance strategy and energy costs by condensing heating and cooling requirements.

Energy Costs

Energy costs are a considerable expenditure for data centers, but you can tweak them—as long as you keep them within server rack temperature recommendations. Failing to stay within guidelines could mean equipment failure and costly downtime.

Here are a few ways to cut heating and cooling costs:

Power Off Unused Equipment—Idle equipment consumes about 30 to 40 percent of its maximum power. Find underutilized equipment, and power it off.

Virtualization—Aggregate servers and storage onto a shared platform while maintaining a strict separation between applications, users, operating systems, and data.

Consolidation—Reduce energy with consolidated storage to share cooling and backup systems.

CPU Power—Turn on power management features on CPUs.

Maintenance Strategy

A data center reports its condition to a centralized management strategy. Monitoring this data can help you and your staff make more cost-effective decisions on maintenance. Waiting for systems to fail to deliver maintenance increases downtime—and severely damages your reputation with clients. Replace components based on manufacturer guidelines to prevent a mishap and avoid the costly mistake of fixing one.

Staff Turnover

Reducing staff turnover will help make your data center more profitable. Offering competitive pay, recognizing good performance, and providing the ability to grow within the company will keep employee morale high. A staff that stays with you means you spend less on training inexperienced individuals to replace them if they should leave.

The best ways to reduce data centers are easy to implement and can help you recoup lost profitability overnight.

Signs Your Business Has Poor Indoor Air Quality

Even when the weather is nice, people tend to spend a great deal of their time indoors. Indoor air can feel nicer than outdoor air, but indoor air is more likely to be polluted and stagnant. When you own or manage an office building, it’s important to maintain your commercial HVAC system to improve circulation, control the temperature in the building, and prevent making your employees sick. Notice the signs your business has poor indoor air quality before the problems become too great.

Health Conditions of Employees

Whether you work in your building or manage it, you may notice signs or complaints of sickness from those who work there. Poor indoor quality can trigger asthma and cause cold and flu symptoms. The amount of dust, chemicals, and other toxins that get trapped in the air are poisonous to your health and can cause further health problems.

Dust Buildup

If the vents in your building are caked with dust, you likely have poor indoor air quality because your filters aren’t clear. You need to clean your filters on a schedule that makes sense for the size of your building and HVAC system. Some systems need new filters every one to three months. You may need to clean or completely change your filter to ensure good air quality in your building.

Mildew Growth

When your building has ventilation problems, it won’t prevent water damage. For instance, bathrooms and other areas of your building where moisture builds up may stay damp and allow mold and mildew to grow. Mold and mildew breed all sorts of health problems in people who ingest or breathe it. Health problems caused by mold include:

Sore throat

Headache

Skin rash

Coughing

Sneezing

Depression

Congestion

Wheezing

Temperature and Humidity Issues

When one room in your building feels noticeably cooler or warmer than another, you likely have issues with your HVAC system—which means you likely have issues with your indoor air quality. It’s important to control the temperature and humidity in your building to prevent mold from growing and to protect your products and employees.

Poor Circulation

When air circulates poorly through your building, it becomes stagnant and noticeably unpleasant to breathe. You can improve the conditions immediately by opening the windows and letting fresh air into your building. If you have a commercial HVAC system, hire someone to make repairs. Furthermore, you can use airflow meters to monitor the efficiency of your HVAC system. Use measurement tools for the performance of your air conditioning fan.

Watch out for these signs your business has poor indoor air quality. You don’t want to make the mistake of letting your HVAC system go unattended. Increase employee retention when you improve the conditions of your workplace.

5 Cleaning Products To Keep in Your Office

Excelling in the workplace is vital. But keeping it clean from top to bottom can be difficult if you aren’t sure what area to hit first. We have janitors and even cleaning crews for deep cleaning, but there are some products you should have on hand for basic housekeeping. Here are the five cleaning products to keep in your office.

1. Glass Cleaner

Regardless of whether you work on the top or bottom floor, cleaning your windows is a necessity. Windows can become dirty pretty fast, so it’s best to clean them every few months to help keep gunk and dirt off. It will help to have a glass cleaner to clean your windows and even clean glass desks or tables you use daily.

2. Disinfecting Wipes

This one makes sense. Always have disinfecting wipes in your utility closet or a drawer in your desk to disinfect objects. Things you should be disinfecting every day include phones, doorknobs, counters in your breakroom, and chairs that don’t have cushions.

3. Stain Removers

It’s normal to spill food, but you shouldn’t wear it home with you or be stuck with it on your person while at work. Stains can ruin everything, especially nice clothes if you aren’t careful. Keep a stain removal stick in your office to help you and your employees look your best. If there’s a blemish on the carpet, a stain remover can help with that too.

4. White Vinegar

One of the five cleaning products to keep in your office happens to be an item you might have never thought to keep around. White vinegar comes in handy when you need a backup home cleaning remedy. It has the same properties as ordinary chemical cleaners. White vinegar can clean anything from a coffee machine to tiled floors.

5. Air Freshener

One of the most critical items to have is an air freshener. Do you have an unwelcome odor that won’t leave? Spray and conceal it with some air freshener. Use either plug-ins or a spray to waft away those dissatisfying smells.

Having these cleaning products ready will help you tackle those necessary surfaces without worrying about not having the right tools to clean with. These products will help restore your office balance and keep your cleaning protocol up to standard.

How To Create an Eco-Friendly Factory

The world has relied on industrial production for centuries; it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that carbon emissions and energy consumption increased to an explosive level. Today, the world wants nothing more than to change. We’re rediscovering how to create an eco-friendly factory standard so we can save our planet and keep moving forward with industrial advancement.

Monopoly of an Industry

Before moving forward with any true changes, the world must first identify the problem. Larger industries that have commercialized and monopolize high production and revenue are the main contributors to global warming. With the levels of carbon emissions and other toxic pollutants they produce daily, these businesses should be targeted in order to have true change.

Meat and Coal Industries

The meat industry and coal industry are two of the highest-grossing and largest manufacturers in the world; they sell more products than any major competitor. You can see that people are going vegan and vegetarian more and more to help fight climate change. Millions of animals and plants are farmed on a commercial basis, making them compete with the levels of CO2 being produced by coal production. Both contribute to the greenhouse emissions that cause global warming.

Revolutionary Renewable Energy Plans

The world is making drastic changes in how it uses energy to lessen energy consumption. We’re reinventing how energy is produced. Some of the things used to make this happen include:

Wind turbines

Solar power

Water turbines

Alongside our methods of energy production and savings, there needs to be implemented energy audits. These are in place to measure those levels of energy production and consumption to track our improvements and losses so we can better our situation.

It may also be worth noting that the equipment supplying these factories and businesses may need to be replaced or changed. Things such as new-age gas supply equipment, regulators, recycled materials and laser marking systems would all be wonderful additions to help cut costs and keep numbers down while we work on improving our production and our environment.

With ideals like these in place, you’ll surely have real change, such as the improvement of company culture. This may include like-minded employees and management aiming for the same goals and holding the same values. When practices like these are used, you’ll be updating the green standard with methods on how to create an eco-friendly factory in no time.