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Archive for the ‘Communications’ Category
How to run your office more efficiently
Tuesday, September 27th, 2016What are your ‘sliding doors’?
Tuesday, September 6th, 2016
“The Sliding Door Company doesn’t use sliding doors” – this is a funny social media post currently doing the rounds. Yes it’s funny and ironic BUT we all have a sliding door that we should be using. What does your business do? How do you showcase it? It’s a top marketing tip for any business to talk less and show more. I drove past a design business recently that had its company name and corporate branding displayed in 3 different ways, demonstrating how NOT to brand your business. His sliding door clearly wasn’t in operation.
It’s tougher if you offer a service like accountancy. What you can do though is make sure that the important qualities of an accountant are as visible as possible – be reliable, answer calls promptly, show efficiency, demonstrate a modern approach, use cutting edge software, work in the cloud, operate an excellent client portal and never get your sums wrong!
What’s your sliding door? What should you be showcasing?
How strong is your online presence?
Monday, August 22nd, 2016This is a great time of year to review things – work practices, your website, how strong your social media is as well as many other parts of your business. A break or holiday sometimes lets you step back a little so you can see areas for improvement. At Online Practice, we look at your online presence in detail. This is a mix of your website, social media and any other activities such as blogs or press activity.
How you are portrayed online is vital to the way you are perceived – by clients, suppliers and even other firms within your sector. A dry, unchanging, outdated website with nothing new can sometimes be worse than not having an online presence at all. It smacks of neglect and a lack of dynamism that is actually not too hard to correct.
A fresh new look to your website to bring it bang up to date, the addition of an interesting blog page and filtering this into bite-size chunks for your social media platforms is surprisingly easy and low maintenance. We can even take it one stage further and create a bespoke monthly newsletter so you communicate with your clients in an informative and regular way.
Talk to us and see how we can advise you to do things better. It’s what we do best.
Take a close look at your working practices
Monday, July 11th, 2016Large organisations invest in (what used to be called) ‘time and motion studies’ – where analysts look at every aspect of an organisation in a bid to make it more efficient and cut wasted costs wherever they can. This is probably not something you can afford to do on a day to day basis but it is definitely worth looking across all your areas of productivity to see what you can improve on, say, every few months.
We advocate a number of efficiency measures but the one thing that our clients cannot live without, once they’ve started using it, is the ability to get clients to sign online. We are big fans of face-to-face time with clients BUT for the important things – planning, strategy, a beer… Not admin or process – that’s just a waste of everyone’s time.
Have a look at how you could manage some of your basic paperwork requirements and see if this can help:
- Collate multiple documents into one neat pdf
- Send securely via a client portal in the cloud
- Let the client review the document, sign it and return via the same portal
- Keep an audit trail of this process
- Look at reports to see where ALL your clients are in this process – who has signed, who has reviewed, who has returned, who do you need to chase?
We think it’s a no-brainer but talk to us and see if it could help your internal procedures and cut any unnecessary costs involved in this unprofitable part of your daily work.
The art of networking just got easier
Tuesday, June 14th, 2016Networking in its traditional sense is my idea of hell on earth. Early morning meetings with weak coffee, a lukewarm bacon butty and endless small talk and hand shaking before I’m fully awake. Then the horror of speaking OUT LOUD in front of 25+ equally sleepy people about who you are, what you do and what you sell. Not fun.
These days there are the equivalents of match.com types of services for businesses. If you know your market and have a clear focus on the types of clients you want, you are highly likely to be able to find a company that can provide these direct to your door. We came across one such service for financial advisers and accountants – Yourmoneyhub.com – an ‘in your face’ introduction service. The founder, James Vinicombe, describes the business as one that helps people and businesses find trusted financial and accounting advice. We like the idea – it saves lots of time and wasted energy and connects people.
We completely subscribe to the idea that you employ people to do the things you can’t.