Once again, we have asked real WORKetc users to drop some of their favorite productivity tips for running, managing, and growing a small business so that you can get ahead of the rest of the pack.
Efficiency and productivity aren’t just buzzwords when it comes to running a small business.
They could make the difference between you leading the pack and being dead last.
This is particularly critical in an economic climate where profit margins are tighter than spandex.
The only way to stay afloat is to make sure your entire business—processes, systems, and employees—are running at maximum efficiency and productivity.
WORKetc helps achieve this by letting users refine, streamline, and simplify their business processes, leading to tangible gains in efficiency, productivity, and profit.
To help you get even more out of WORKetc, we are once again turning to the people who actually use it to run, manage, and grow their business every day.
Read on for some knowledge bombs and tips from real WORKetc users to help you leave your competitors in the dust.
Roll Out New Projects Fast
Use project templates to their fullest. We always make sure that our templated projects cater for anything new that comes in. We’ve now got most of the various project milestones sorted in such a way that they highlight as the milestones which they depend on are completed.
– Stan Zaslavsky, Owner / Principal at Eagle Vision Property.
(Read more about how this 3D visualization company uses WORKetc every day)
Project templates make it easy to quickly roll out projects that you take-on regularly.
Let’ say you run a digital marketing agency whose main specialty is social media marketing.
You know you’ll be rolling out a lot of these projects with mostly the same sub-projects and task structure. The main difference between each would largely just be which social media channels your client wants to target.
Creating a template for your social media marketing projects will mean that with just a few clicks your project will be ready to use with the structure you need.
Project Templates mean you aren’t starting with a blank canvas every time you take a new project.
You don’t have to make every single project from scratch every time. All you need to do is assign tasks, set deadlines, and tweak the project according to whether the clients wants Facebook marketing instead of Instagram, or Pinterest instead of Twitter.
Capture All the Info Your Business Needs
Take advantage of custom fields. We use them to keep up with so many things that don’t fit neatly elsewhere. We use it to mark when we last did maintenance service for our clients. We also use them to keep track of our hourly rate for each customer.
– Randy Bryan, Owner at tekRESCUE.
(Read more about how this IT support company uses WORKetc every day)
One of the big decisions we made during the early stages of WORKetc was to make it highly usable by many different types of business.
To do that, we decided to group data fields that might be industry specific into their own container called custom fields.
We then made this container able to hold different data types, making them 100% customizable for each individual customer, business, or industry.
Custom Fields are the perfect way to incorporate industry-specific information in your CRM and Projects.
Let’s say you run a business that sells water coolers. In addition, you also deliver water to your customers’ offices.
Aside from the usual customer info that you need, you also need to know how much each water each office uses on average, the type of water cooler they have, when your last delivery and maintenance jobs were, and even the name of their receptionist.
With WORKetc’s custom fields, you can store all of this information right in your customers’ contact entries. You can also this info to a sales lead when it comes time to win their business again for the coming year.
Stay Up to Date on Everything
Number one tip currently is to use the WORKetc calendar’s All Activities view so we can see all our support tickets and tasks for the day when it’s time to check/write out timesheets. Our team are rarely missing any activities and no longer have to make things up in timesheets.
– Malissa Fonte, Director at Atcom Technology.
(Read more about how this IT firm uses WORKetc every day to run their business)
By default, WORKetc’s calendar always show events such as meetings, client calls, and holidays.
It can, however, actually show any kind of WORKetc activity—from the support tickets you have on your plate today to the tasks you’re supposed to work on next week—simply by using the “Activities” drop-down.
A company that sells and installs routers can then, for example, set the calendar to show tasks so they can quickly get a visual overview of all the installation jobs they have scheduled for the week.
Or you can set it to show only timesheets so you can quickly review how long your third-party contractors are taking on the jobs to which they’ve been assigned.
You can filter your calendar to any “activity” you have within it – from tasks to tickets.
Note that you’re not limited to showing just one type of activity on the calendar. You can mix and match different activity types or choose to view everything.
Hit the Ground Running with WORKetc
Staff training and continual staff involvement are the keys to using the tools WORKetc provides and getting the most from them. Right now, our company devotes the first 100 hours of time for new associates to training.
– Keith Klein, Owner at OnYourMark.
Choosing a CRM may be hard work, what with all the research involved, but it’s in the implementation phase where things really become super crucial.
After all, at that point you’ve already spent money, time, and effort on the darn thing. It’s paramount that you don’t end up scrapping it due to a lack of employee buy-in.
We know that helping your employees get used to and using WORKetc as quickly as possible is critical in keeping your business growing.
That’s why we have dedicated customer support and product specialist teams ready to help with your specific needs during setup, and to continue answering any roadblocks you may have down the line.
The faster you start streamlining your processes, the sooner you can push your business towards operating at peak efficiency and productivity.
And like I said before, an efficient and productive business is the only business that has a chance of surviving in these harsh economic times.