Have you heard this saying before? It’s literally at the core of everything we do. Every time we work with a customer it is with one thing in mind – allowing them to work smarter, not harder. Because doing so can save you thousands of pounds every year, as we’ve often found. How much time do you lose typing up paper forms that are handed in each day? How much time do you lose working out costs on a job and typing up invoices? How much time do you lose chasing up jobs to answer customers queries? This isn’t working smart. All of this can be automated to save you time and money. Do you want a good example of this? Well, we once worked with a small engineering company that was losing thousands of man hours every day due to the way they handled timesheets. Every Monday morning each employee would pop in to the office and drop off their timesheet, then head out to site to work. They were losing an hour of production every morning, for every employee. 10 employees x consultancy rate (£50/hr) = £500 a week, or £26,000 a year! We wrote them a timesheet…
We all want to make our business run as smoothly as possible and in this article we share our top four ways you can improve business performance for you and your colleagues. 4) Ditch The Excel Spreadsheets Not that there’s anything wrong with Excel, don’t get me wrong. It’s a very useful tool in the right situation. But it doesn’t scale. If you’re a one-man-band there’s nothing wrong with keeping a list of all your jobs in an Excel spreadsheet. But what happens when you add a few more members of staff? Perhaps Dave decides to help out and update a few of his jobs, so he copies the spreadsheet, makes a few changes, then copies it back. In-between, John opens the spreadsheet and adds a few jobs of his own. Whoops – Dave just overwrote all those changes! A few years ago I knew a company who had created a great Excel spreadsheet for producing quotes. Every January they would increase their prices, and here lies the problem… Employees were always forgetting to download the updated template with the new prices, instead copying similar quotes from the previous year and sending them out – complete with last year’s prices!…
There’s something about the changing of the calendar year that makes us sit back and reflect on where we are in life. Maybe it’s the break for Christmas and the chance to rest and reset. Whatever it is, right now gyms across the country are being flooded with new membership signups as people experience a sudden urge to make changes in their lives. New Year – New You. Bars are emptier than normal as people attempt “Dry January” etc. We make promises for the year to come: get fit, eat healthier, learn a new language, travel more. We’re determined to change and become a better person than we were last year. So why not do the same for your business? Businesses are no different to our personal lives. We’re well aware of all the problems, but we brush them aside and carry on the way we always have, thinking we’ll sort the issues later when we have time. But as we begin to return to work and start getting back up to speed, now is the ideal time to start looking at things with a fresh take. How could you make your business healthier? Like the personal health kicks…
