If you’re anything like me, you’re always looking for a way to make your business more efficient. I speak with small and medium business owners on a daily basis, and I find it’s something even the best companies can improve on.
Efficiency, however, is a broad term that could mean a lot of things. But what it really boils down to is one question: how can my company make the biggest profit in the smallest amount of time?
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How often do you lose money because of simple mistakes, like making a delivery to the wrong address? How often are you penalised for arriving late? How often do your employees get lost?
Even if you accept a certain amount of waste as being inevitable, the fact is that these things add up over the year, potentially taking a large chunk out of your profits.
In a nutshell, time is money – or the potential for money. The more time you waste on inefficient activities, the less free time you have to spend doing productive activities that will help your business grow.
Michael Gerber, in his world-famous book ‘The E-myth revisited – Why most small businesses fail and what to do about it’, stresses that one of the reasons businesses fail is that the owners spend too much time on day-to-day tasks. So if you are a small business owner, it’s vitally important to spend enough time steering your ship in the right direction.
One of the most common ways our clients improve their time efficiency is by using AutoAlert’s job management features. Because AutoAlert gives you automatic notifications whenever a job is added by a customer, or whenever the job status is updated by an employee, you spend less time chasing jobs up. In addition, you’ll spend less time filling out and duplicating job sheets, as all data is managed and sent to staff electronically. AutoAlert even generates invoices for you, saving yet more time.
This one is particularly important if your employees are out in the field. If you can’t assign jobs to staff and relay information to them easily, they will miss out on opportunities to finish jobs quickly. This could result in you taking on fewer jobs overall, meaning you’ll make less profit.
This is another reason that a mobile-based job system like AutoAlert is so useful. As soon as a job is entered into your system by you or a customer, it can then be assigned to an employee, who receives an instant notification on their mobile device. Additionally, you can simply communicate via AutoAlert’s messaging system. It’s a lot easier than trying to get busy workers on the phone.
Have you ever been working for a company and thought “our company could save so much money if our managers only asked us for input”?
The fact is, a lot of companies just never think of asking low-level employees for help. Your employees do the same job every single day, so there’s a chance they know their corner of the business better than you do. Why not ask them if they have any ideas on how you could save money or improve your service?
It may not always be possible to give a flawless service to your customers, but at the very least, you should make sure that you are doing a better job than your competitors. Even if you feel you’re already doing this, it’s worth asking yourself a couple of times a year, “if a competing company opened tomorrow, would I have any reason to be worried?”
One of the best ways to retain your regular orders is through giving good customer service. If you don’t, it could cost you – a 2013 study showed that UK businesses lose £12billion a year through poor customer service.
While we don’t want to overdo the self-promotion, this is another area where AutoAlert can help. Because your employees can update job statuses from their mobiles, it means that when customers call for updates, you’ll always have up-to-date information for them. AutoAlert also warns you if a job hasn’t been picked up or is running late, so you can correct the problem sooner.
We meet lots of interesting and ambitious companies in our travels. Many want to grow their companies and build a national presence. Unfortunately, many of the business owners we speak to find they don’t have enough time in the day to manage their existing jobs, never mind expand, take on new customers and subcontractors and build their business.
So what do you do if you’re ambitious, keen to grow your business but not sure why you never have enough time in the day?
Following are ten signs which point to a problem with your existing way of managing your jobs
We believe that job scheduling software can help. By focusing on the exceptions rather than every job, you can free up your time to grow your business.
AutoAlert Job scheduling puts the information at your fingertips when you need it, rather than having to chase your staff. This reduces stress, lets your staff get on with their work without interuption and means you can answer calls from customers at the time rather than trying to find out the status of the job then having to ring your customer back later.
With AutoAlert Job Scheduling, your engineer can update the job in the field. As soon as they update the job you can see the job’s status back in the office. As information is entered at the time then there is less chance of information being forgotten or lost. Any discrepancy can also be investigated while still fresh in peoples minds.
You can also raise an invoice as soon as the job is complete with the information automatically uploaded from the electronic job sheet. You can see that your customer has received the invoice and send notifications if payment has not been received. This means less chasing, less disputes over invoices and quicker payment!
We’ve also picked up some other tips and suggestions for busy entrepreneurs along the way. Here’s our top three along with links to some other interesting articles.
Check out these other posts for more tips and suggestions:
Find out more about how AutoAlert job scheduling and tracking software can help benefit your business.
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