What is Crowd Sourcing?

Crowd sourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing it to an undefined group of people. “There would be no buildings costs, no pensions and no healthcare costs, making huge savings,” said Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management.

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“I keep wondering how long it will be before the accounting profession is hit hard by outsourcing. So far, it has hardly been touched. Yet, accounting is a conceptually easy target. I believe the only thing holding back outsourcing accounting jobs is fear that data (account numbers, credit card numbers, proprietary results, etc) falls in the wrong hands,” says Mike “Mish” Shedlock. Click here to read the full article

Your privacy is really important to us.

Smart takes security of your information very seriously and takes measures to ensure that your important business information is never compromised. That it is kept strictly confidential, and backed-up off-site every day – click here to find out how

Enquire about Smart’s cost effective, confidential, professional outsourced accounting services. Click here to get a quote

Fed up with funneling cash into marketing that seems to cost more and to do less? How do you work out what ‘works’ and what doesn’t?

You need to know the return on investment (ROI) of each marketing dollar you spend. Especially when technology means your potential customers can access information in a multitude of different ways. The aim is to identify potential buyers and track whether they respond to your marketing by making a purchase.

It is called testing and measuring. Most people hate it. But if you don’t measure and you might as well stand on the footpath outside your business and give $100 dollar notes to the first 20 people that walk past. Remember the newspaper advertising you tried that ‘didn’t work’, and the radio spots that ‘only did OK’? Money you’ve given away that you won’t get back.

Start asking people where they heard about you.

Start right now. Immediately. If you don’t know you’ll never know which marketing to use and you’ll keep running (and paying for) advertising that never brings a dollar into your business. Every time someone calls or buys, ask them this question – “By the way, can I ask how you heard about us.”

Keep track.

Record customer details and how they heard about your business, and ensure every member of your team does the same. Keep notes on what was discussed and what action is needed. Pay attention to chit-chat and jot down some notes. Rather than relying on your memory invest in database/customer relationship software or outsource your phone answering to someone who can do this for you. At the end of each week or month, add up the figures. Now you can start making decisions…

Stop and change.

When you see something isn’t working (when your profit margin from the sales is not at least paying for the ad), stop it straight away. Then change it. Try a different headline, media, offer, look etc… Make one small change each time…If it doesn’t work again, make another change and give it another try…until you find what works, and weed out the costly ones that don’t.  Do this one at a time with each marketing media that you use…Stop and change.

Test and measure.

Track the result – how many enquiries were generated and how many of those turned into sales? Compare that with what it cost and check whether it paid for itself. If it costs $300 to run an ad that brings in 10 customers and makes you $1,000 in profit, it’s a good ad.

Upsize me.

When you know what’s working upsize it.  Do the same thing on a larger scale. If it’s flyers, then drop twice as many. If it’s an ad, run it in more papers, run it more often or increase its size. 

Check conversions.

This will tell you if you have a marketing problem, or a sales problem. Be honest – how many enquiries do you convert into sales? If you don’t know the answer – start measuring. Otherwise you’re throwing money away bringing people in that aren’t buying. Is it possible to increase conversions, even a little?

Give your customers more reasons to buy from you. Price is only one reason. What if the salesperson were a bit friendlier? Are you willing to back your product with a guarantee? Can you offer free delivery?

Remove the guesswork. Measuring your marketing ROI will give you a real competitive advantage.

Now you know what makes your phone ring – but how those phone calls are answered will mean the difference between a sale or not.

Smart’s personalised phone service ensures your calls are answered; your customers deal with a real person and get the answers they need as quickly as possible. We’ll manage bookings or appointments for you, qualify leads with a script, and then record the details in a database we’ll provide for you. Click here to enquire about Smart phone answering services.

Consider the following eight areas that could create employee downtime in your business;

Jobs -all the jobs that must occur in your business to keep the business running but are non- billable – cleaning, repairs and servicing, meetings, research and development

Rework – work that is generated from employees “getting it wrong” or from poor direction and specifications from management. A lot of rework isn’t necessarily known about by business owners as employees have a vested interest in concealing their mistakes.

Non charged work - on jobs or products which are not paid for, or work that is carried out for clients at no charge.

“Blow outs” of time on jobs – If you cost and sell a service or a job for 20 hours and it takes 25 then the extra 5 hours is downtime. This can generate substantial downtime if you do not; 1) advise your employees of the budgeted time before they start, 2) include office and administration staff in your budgeted job hours, and 3) accurately report to both staff and management actual time “Live” on jobs.

Waiting for work – employees wait for work mainly due to low sales, poor job planning, waiting for completion of previous processes, not knowing what to go onto next, helping other staff and inefficiently doubling up time on jobs.

Training – downtime for trainer and trainee, for both new and existing employees. New staff take time getting up to speed. Many business owners tell us that their new staff “take twice the budgeted time on jobs on day 1 and it takes 3 months on average to bring them up to speed”.

Stolen time – employees “steal” time in a number of ways, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately, including being late to start work “at the desk” in the morning, early to leave work, early to breaks and lunch, and late back from both, sitting around doing nothing, talking to other staff (where both employees are not working), dealing with their personal life at work (phone, texting, browsing the internet, visiting social networking sites).

Going “walk about” – poorly planned: office, equipment, supplies…

In considering the above if you estimate that your total downtime is 10% you are probably being optimistic. 15% downtime is an hour and a quarter out of every eight hour day. That’s a pretty scary thought.

How can you increase “Productive Work Time” that can be charged out?

You may consider your office and administration staff to be “overhead staff” and therefore an “overhead” cost. But when office employees are treated solely as “overhead staff” SUBSTANTIAL hours are wasted as downtime, and you have no way of accurately factoring back office and admin time into job costing or service delivery.

Two ways to reduce office downtime

1. Have your office and administration staff log on to start and finish jobs on their PC so you can see precisely the hours involved – track and report actual times on jobs (and therefore actual downtime) daily and weekly to both themselves and to you. 
2. Or outsource it – that way you only pay to get the job done – not for unproductive time.

Ask yourself – What admin tasks can be achieved more efficiently and effectively in my business?

Click here to find out how outsourcing your admin could save you money

If anybody took $100 from your till you’d jump up and down demanding payback. You’d drop everything else and go right off the deep end. You wouldn’t rest till you found the culprit. Would you?

Yet while you’re reading this your business could be losing hundreds…maybe even thousands of dollars…because of the way your employees and family members answer your business phone. Can you afford to let that happen?

How much of your business comes through the phone? How many of those phone calls are converted to sales or bookings? And how many missed calls do you have each week?

You might be mortified to learn that your employees or family members may have blown tens of thousands of dollars a year just by not being great on the phone!!

Take a hairdresser for example, whose customers phone for an appointment. What would it mean to their bottom line if they converted just two more calls to a $100 booking every day? Guess… In excess of $50,000 a year. If they’re missing up to ten calls every day you can hear $250,000 a year going down the gurgler! And add to that what it has cost you in advertising and promotion to make that phone ring…

It’s not about simply missing calls. Having a human voice instead of a recorded message maintains your business’s image and reassures customers that your company is legitimate, accessible and that their call means something.

So what is a phone call worth to you if it’s answered properly? What is your average sale worth? How many sales are you losing because of missed, bungled or non-returned phone calls?

How many more customers and sales could you get if this was fixed? Fix your phone answering. Find out how Smart can help you increase your phone sales right now.

Money is tight. To capture your share of the available dollars you need quick phone answering, short hold times, no run around, no fobbing off from one person to another person and no one telling the caller they don’t know the answer.

These are the top caller “gripes” that will cost you business:

1. You’re too slow

This caller will just give up on calling you because you take too long to answer the phone and they need help NOW. If they can’t get that from your business, they’ll go elsewhere.They’re giving their money to the next business listed in the yellow pages

2. You sound so bored

This caller will just hang up on your business when the person who answers sounds bored and uninterested. They’ll keep on phoning until they get someone on the other end of the phone whose voice and phone manner makes them feel liked, who sounds genuine and trustworthy to them. They are your competitors customer now.

3. You don’t listen

This caller is up in arms because of the way one of your employees talked over the top of them. Now they’re telling everyone they know that you’re an idiot. They’re damaging your business.

4. You don’t know anything

This caller cannot believe you let someone who doesn’t know enough about your business answer your phone. They’re giving their money to someone else and making that businesses bank balance healthier.

If your business isn’t giving a great first impression over the phone you’re losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Find out how the Smart team can help you increase your phone sales and service right now.

Often the cost of outsourcing is less than employing someone to do your admin, training them and sitting them down in a fully equipped office—let alone paying them for leave time when they’re not there—so you’re already ahead. 

If you or your employees can earn more doing billable work that you can charge out – than Smart charges you to do your admin—you’re  even further ahead . You might only have to convert all those hours you currently spend doing admin yourself to a couple of extra chargeable hours a month to cover the cost of our time.

And remember—we’re experienced specialists who focus on admin all day long—that’s what we do! We’ll spend much less time than you would to complete your admin and accounts. Our six hours of work would probably take you closer to twelve hours. What would you rather do?  A couple of extra billable hours or twelve hours of your time doing paperwork and bookkeeping that you can’t charge out?

You’ll also save on phone calls, postage, envelopes, printing and office supplies as these are included in your Smart service.

So get Smart to do the office work and accounts (the things you don’t enjoy).

Get your evenings and weekends back and take home more money at the end of the day…!

Click here to find out how much you could save by outsourcing

Need help with your bookkeeping or admin?

Click here to find out more about Smarts services

Never seem to have enough time, and don’t know where it all goes? Wish you had more time for yourself or your family? Feel like you’re in a time warp?

We’ve only got 168 hours each week and sometimes it feels like it’s all used up on working in and running your business, and sleep. With so much going on, some pretty important stuff gets put on the back burner like exercise, reading for fun, quality family time, holidays, hanging out with friends and just enjoying life. So let’s see how you spend your time, and what that time is worth.

How many hours do you devote to your business each year?

How many hours a day do you work? _______
How many days a week do you work? _______
How many weeks a year do you work? _______

____hours x ____days x ____weeks = ____hours a year

e.g. 8hours x 5days x 50weeks = 2,000 hours a year

You might work 50 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, but that’s not really all. You also have your commute, the extra time you work outside the office, the evenings and weekends spent doing bookwork, business travel, time invested in securing and maintaining child care, business dinners and parties, conferences and trade shows and so on. If you don’t know how much time you invest, make a week’s estimate and multiply by 52, or make a month’s estimate and multiply by 12 = ____real hours a year
e.g. 50hours x 50weeks = 2,500 real hours a year.

What’s each of those 60 minutes worth to you?

Calculating this number is fairly easy. First of all, how much did you make last year? Take your earnings and divide it by the real number of hours you put in to your business  e.g. $100,000 / 2,500 hours = $40ph

That’s what each of your hours is worth with your current earnings.

But what do you want to earn in the next 12 months?

Desired income =  $_______     e.g. $150,000

Realistically, you’re not doing billable work all these hours. Have you ever tallied up the number of hours you spend each week answering phones, responding to emails, shuffling paper or taking care of things that aren’t making you money? Keep track of all your miscellaneous work for just one week, then do the maths. How many non-productive hours a day, a week and a year do you work?

Let’s say that 25 percent of your hours are non- billable. That means only 75 percent of the hours your devote to your business are available to generate your desired income. Divide your desired income by 75% of the hours you work in your business to determine your true hourly rate  e.g. 2,500 x 75% = 1,875 hours.

$150,000 / 1,875 hours = $80ph

Your time is valuable or you wouldn’t be in business. Stop guessing what your time is worth. Make the most of it…AND have a life! Get out of that time warp.

Run your business “on my time” and “on my terms”…

Now that you know your true hourly rate, you can see that any work earning you less than your hourly rate can, and probably should, be outsourced. Unless you enjoy something, want to learn more about it, or can do it much faster, then seriously consider paying for help.

If your time is worth $80 an hour (based on the example on page one), then you’re a lot worse off  if you’re doing these things yourself. If you spend 10 hours a week doing tasks that could have been outsourced, you’re costing your business $800 every week. That’s over $40,000 a year that could have gone toward virtual staff who cost much less.

Despite what you might think, outsourcing can do wonders for your bottom line-and your blood pressure!

Of course, few of us can afford to outsource every chore we despise. So prioritise, starting with the tasks that drain more of your energy and create the most strife in your personal and business relationships.

Are these tasks worth your time?

Event planning, cleaning your office, accounts (invoices, accounts receivable, bank reconciliations, GST returns), payroll, filing,   answering phones, making bookings or appointments, web site maintenance, customer service, sales, marketing and PR.

Most of these tasks don’t require you to hire a real live, warm-body, under-foot, on-site employee. You can now hire virtual staff.

Leave the phones, paperwork, bookkeeping and order taking to us.

Smart will provide you with a team of professional virtual office staff who cost much less than EITHER you OR an office admin employee.

Not only can Smart provide you with a virtual team and fully equipped offices, but also a wide range of business support services (phones, admin, financial, payroll).

Smart will tailor a bespoke package of services to match your individual business needs …AND at a fraction of your hourly rate!

So what are you waiting for? Get Smart support for your business. Give us a call…tell us about your business needs and see how Smart could work for you.

We’re here to make your life easier.