Thursday, April 22, 2010

Help Your Clients With Earth-Friendly Remodeling Projects


It’s Earth Day, a day to inspire awareness and appreciation for the environment. Help your clients to be more aware by suggesting environmentally friendly remodeling projects. Recommend sustainable natural products, reclaimed materials, low-VOC paints and materials made from recycled products. Keep energy efficiency in mind. The earth will thank you and so will your clients!

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

My lean mean hairdresser

I visited my hairdresser yesterday for my normal appointment. I’ve been going to her for years and it was a regular visit. She had some exciting news to share. She told me I can now schedule my appointments with her on-line. I simply create an account with the on-line appointment service, click on her name and schedule my appointments. This morning I scheduled my hair appointments for the rest of the year. Pretty cool.

As we chatted yesterday, she told me that one of her biggest problems since she doesn’t have an assistant is the scheduling of appointments. She tried to schedule the next appointment before a customer left but, inevitably, someone needed to re-schedule or didn’t know their schedule and would call back. That led to playing phone tag. The process was frustrating and inefficient.

Using an on-line appointment scheduling service allows her to delegate that task and put it squarely in the hands of her customer. The service even syncs with the customer’s Outlook or Google calendar and sends the customer an automatic appointment reminder e-mail.

In this “new economy,” businesses must find new ways to become leaner yet more efficient at the same time. That may seem like an oxymoron but it is not. There are many tasks we do that can be handed off and not always to another person in our own organization. Many on-line services have cropped up that can handle anything from setting appointments to reminding us of birthdays and anniversaries.

Look at the processes in your own organization, especially the ones that take up the most time and are the most inefficient. Now, get on-line and start researching. Talk to other service providers to see how they handle these same issues. I bet there are other people out there who have conquered the same things that are driving you crazy.