CLIP's Tips

This year, one of my favorite and most frequently used productivity services is reQall. It became a perfect solution to a common scenario for me:

Does this scenario ever happen to you?  You are driving down the road, a great idea hits you but you are in the middle of traffic and can’t write anything down.  You arrive at your destination 10 minutes later and the thought has archived itself in the recesses of your mind.  What about when you get a call from a customer or coworker while you are on the road?  By the time you’ve reached your destination, do you still remember what it was they wanted you to do?  I know I don’t.  Well I’ve discovered a free service that will be of value to those who struggle with the same issue.

With reQall, you can record a voice memo on your phone, and within minutes that memo will appear transcribed into writing in your email inbox. ReQall’s simplicity is what makes it so effective. Here’s how to use it (once you have registered):

• Call the service from your phone.
• Say, “add,” and then say your message.
• The service will then transcribe your message and send the written message to your email.

Beyond this functionality it also has the ability to:

• Set up and remind you of appointments
• Create shopping lists
• Create to do lists
• And more…

Check it out:  www.reQall.com and sign up, it’s free.

reQall is a trademark of reQall Inc.

As I stated in my last post, systems are essential to growing a successful business whether your goal is beach management or company growth growth.  One type of system that we have implemented in both CLIP Software and CLIP Lawn Care is creating our own manuals for in-house procedures.  Some examples of manuals that we use are:

- How to add a new customer into CLIP and how to schedule their job.

- How to record work using CLIP2GO (in Spanish, for our crew members).

- How to do monthly billing.

- How to change the oil on each of our trucks.

These manuals enable anyone in our company to do these processes with minimal to zero training.

All you need to make a manual is Microsoft Word and possibly a digital camera.

 

Click Here to Open or Download the Instructions: How to create simple manual using Microsoft Word

Remember, it will be tempting just to go about the normal way of doing things and not create these manuals simply because they take some time initially.  For the sake of working on your business and not just in it, invest the time to create some good manuals that will be used over and over again.

Here are some samples:

How to Add Postage to CLIP Lawn Care Mail

Daily Procedure for Using CLIP2GO (Spanish)

How to Schedule a $35 Special

Application Action:  Within the next 24 hours after you read this, when someone asks you for instructions on how to do something that takes less than five minutes, do not show or tell them how to do it.  Take the time necessary to create a short manual for how to do this process.  Give it to them and say, “I’m trying something new.  Try following these directions and let me know how it turns out.  I appreciate it!”

Photo: svilen001

We here at CLIP often refer to something we call Beach Management.  In essence, Beach Management means getting your business to the point where you can step away from the business for an extended period of time (imagine a hammock, white sand, blue water, and an umbrella in your drink) and the business can continue to run well.

The principles that flow out of a desire for “beach management” also directly apply to a business that wants to grow in volume.  One key to beach management and/or company growth is systems.  In order to grow your company from the size it is now, it is vital that you create a system-dependent company rather than a people-dependent company.

Consider the following questions:

Do you have people coming to you constantly asking questions about everyday business processes?

Are you having to train people over and over again on the same procedures?

If your office manager or receptionist quit, would your office become chaos?

Do you have different employees doing the same task yet getting very different results in terms of quality?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you have room for improvement in your systems.  By systems, I mean a technology or a documented way of doing things that allows your company, as easily as possible, to get successful results every time.  Some examples of systems could be:

-  A software program such as CLIP that allows you to schedule your jobs once and have the program take care of the weekly scheduling.  (You’ve got this one covered!)

-  A set step by step process for doing a Spring Cleanup

            For example:  First trim bushes, then remove all leaves, then weed, then…).

-  A manual explaining all of the steps to complete your monthly billing. 

In an upcoming post, I will teach you to create a simple but effective manual for doing almost anything in your business.

Application Action:  Next time you walk into a successful business, think about all of the systems they have in place.  Take one idea from that business and apply it to yours.

P.S.  We don’t support CLIP on that computer anymore.

The Scenario

Your email:

Hi Mary,

Joe is driving me crazy.  I have talked to him multiple times about the complaints at the Omni Building but he hasn’t improved the service at all.  I am thinking about firing him next time he comes in.  Give me your thoughts.

Regards,
Jon

You hit send and as you press the button you notice that you addressed the email to Marty (Joe’s best friend) instead of Mary your office manager.  “Uh-Oh!”

Or what about this scenario?:

You send an email to a client with the words, “…is attached” and you hit send, forgetting to attach the file?

The Solution

We all make stupid mistakes in emails.  This year, I discovered a trick that has saved me from those scenarios many times: have your email program delay sending items until three minutes after you hit send.  Here are the steps to set it up in Outlook 2007 (Similar in different versions as well):

1.  Select Tools > Rules and Alerts

2.  Click New Rule.

3.  Select “Check Messages after Sending” then click Next.

4.  Click Next Again.

5.  A message box will pop up telling you that it will be applied to every message you send.  Click Yes.

6.  On the next screen, click the checkbox next to the last option (defer delivery by a number of minutes).

7.  In the bottom part of the window, click “a number of.”

8.  Enter 3 minutes then click ok.

9.  Click Next.

10.  Click Next again.

11.  Here you can title your rule something like “Don’t Send Stupid Emails” as it was put by The HowToGeek

12.  Click Finish.

Outlook will now wait three minutes after you click send to actually send it.  If you realize that you need to change something within those three minutes, just go to your outbox and change or delete the email.

Do you have any tips on how you prevent yourself from making stupid mistakes?  Feel free to share them in the comments.

Source:  How to Geek

Do you ever want to get a message out to your customers quickly but don’t have the office staff to get it done on the phone?  There is always email, but it is rare for a company to have email addresses for all of their customers (more on that to come).

Recently, during the spring monsoon weather, I wanted to update my customers on our delayed schedule due to the rain.  At the time, we did not have a receptionsit so I needed another option.  This is where DialMyCalls.com comes in.

DialMyCalls.com is an inexpensive service that will call any list of phone numbers and play a message that you have recorded when someone (or the voicemail) picks up.  It worked splendidly for us and took no longer than an hour to set up for the first time.  It cost us $13.00 to send the message to about 200 customers.  Although I had been worried about having unhappy customers from sending out a recorded voice message, we received nothing but positive feedback.

Here’s the basics of how it works

- Sign up online for a free account.

- Purchase credits based on how many calls you expect to make (Pricing here)

- Upload an excel sheet with the customer phone numbers (only minutes to create in CLIP using custom reports)

- Record a message using your computer or telephone.

- Choose whether to send the message now or wait until a specified time.

Dialmycalls Review by Lifehacker

www.DialMyCalls.com

Let me know in the comments below if you have any other time saving tips for getting messages to your customers.