Business Time Saver: Answering Service

Ring, Ring! Does the sound of the phone strike fear about who’s answering the phone. Is training and developing high skilled phone staff taking all your time? Getting the phone answered is one of the most important functions in most businesses. Over the last year, I’ve been outsourcing many functions to save time and keep my staff to a minimum. I found that using an answering service has become my biggest time and money savers without sacrificing quality.

If your business is an appointment driven business like mine, finding a good answering service is one of the most cost effective and time effective services. My answering service provides 24/7 call answering and appointment scheduling for only about $150 per month. Before you wave off an answering service as something that your business can’t use or feel that you can do it better internally, read on.

Advantages of and answering service
Cost effective - For $150 per month, there’s no way you could staff your small business for answering the phones with that small of a budget.
24/7 answering – The great thing about an answering service is they answer your phone around the clock. My answering service has scheduled appointments for me as late as 10:00 at night. One of the most difficult things is getting a client back on the phone after they leave a message. This never becomes an issue because the phone is always answered.
No training required – Since answering services specialize in answering phones, they also provide you with trained phone staff therefore saving you the time of mentoring and training your own staff.
Better results – One of the major surprises of switching to answering service is that I experienced a better phone call to appointment conversion rate. Why? First off, the answering service is totally focused on scheduling appointments and strictly follow a script instead of your own staff providing two much information and kind of winging every phone call. Second, if the answering service does not immediately schedule an appointment, they get all of the prospects information for follow-up. This provides you a second chance for a follow up call.

Focus Internal Staff other more important activities – With the phones outsourced, my internal staff can concentrate on servicing student and working on upgrading memberships without being interrupted.

In my business, I answered most of the calls and inquiries. By going to answering service, I virtually saved eight additional hours of work per day. Almost overnight, I gained 40 additional hours to use on other high value activities. $150 is a small cost pay for so much more free time.

Wealth AhHa!

My wife and I were at her company’s Christmas Dinner for employees. At our table was the CFO of her company. Well, during the conversation, he talked about how poor he was. Ester and I looked at each other in amazement because this CFO made a salary of about $300,000 plus bonuses. How could he be poor?

Then, the wealth AhHa! came to me…

Regardless of yearly income, we all feel the money pinch – rich or poor.

I guess the question remains whether your money pinch is lifestyle or wealth related.

Most have a lifestyle related money pinch meaning that they spend most of their income on that new car, bigger houses, and more stuff. These peoples spending balloon to the size of their income and carry credit cards debts. The lifestyle money pinch comes with great risks. Because, if you lose a job, your lifestyle remains the same – car payments, home mortgage, credit card payments, etc. The more money you make the higher the risk because you are able to build a larger lifestyle.

The wealth building money pinch is a different story. These people feel the money pinch because they are constantly using earned money to build additional wealth by investing in the future. It could be investing in your 401K or purchasing a rental property or investing in your education.

I must admit that I have felt the money pinch for years. I always had to watch my spending. For the first 10 year of my career, I saved and invested between 10 to 25% of my income in a 401K, an IRA, and a regular investment account. Later, I felt the pinch because I was investing in growing my new karate business. Now, 5 years later, I am still feeling the money pinch because I am preparing to purchase some commercial real estate.

Truthfully, my money pinch gives me a great piece of mind. I don’t mind forgoing the big car payments and oversized house to generate more wealth.

So what’s your money pinch is it lifestyle or wealth building?

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Those Annoying Door to Door Sales People

It never fails. Everytime, I am at my business and rolling on the highly important items on my to-do list some sales person comes in to sell me another newspaper ad, coupon book, yellow pages, or mailing. It's not that I don't feel advertising is important, but it's the amount of time they waste and most of them create meager results for the cost.

It's best to just get good at saying "No". If you tell them you'll think about it, you open the door for them calling and following up with you, therefore wasting additional time. Saying "No" will thwart 95% of the salesman and send them out your door.

Okay, now for the other 5%. These are the more savvy salesman that won't leave on the initial "No". Sales training teaches these guys to find out what the objection is and they have a response to each objection. The idea is to elevate each objection so that you don't have a reason to buy their product or service. These salesman are great at wasting tremendous amounts of time.

How do you handle these savvy sales people?

It's as easy as not playing their objection game. When you say "You're not interested?" and they ask for the reason why. You can reserve the right to say "No". I tell them that "Sorry, but I don't need to justify my reason to say NO." This stumps them everytime.

If you do want the product or service, then say yes. If it's an advertisement, measure, measure, measure the results. I have separate phone numbers I use on ads to measure the results.

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We're Back!

Last year, I stopped writing on this blog to concentrate on my businesses blog.

We're Back!!

This year has been the best year for my business despite the economic and financial climate. I have so much to share.

Over the last year, I took on tons of coaching and finally got rid of it all because it didn't help me at all. Most coaching is like get rich schemes where they continue to sell you the next big thing but never actually give you much value.

But on the other hand, many of the ideas that I had, generated great gains. I found that one of my best coaches was writing.

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Summertime of Marketing

Wow, I am super busy and finding the time to journal is difficult. Most karate schools resolve themselves to the fact that summers at a Martial Arts Schools are slow. I have a totally different attitude.

Every summer, I don’t accept the whole slow theory. I see it as an opportunity to hit the pavement running and I spend my time marketing my school. Yes, that’s right. If you’re a school owner, don’t fret the summer – get busy now and you’ll have the busiest fall season of your life.

I feel the difference between success and failure is that…

The successful people always focus on tasks that will combat worries

Whenever I am worried about my student enrollments, the only way for me to elevate them is to perform tasks that will solve the problem –MARKETING. Instead of becoming a victim to my “poor-me” thoughts, I do everything in my power to fight back. I feel relieved when I write an e-mail campaign. Passing out flyers comforts me. Hanging posters reassures my soul.

What worries do you have? Focus on the activities that will produce the results that you desire and cast off the worries. Comfort yourself with the right activities and enjoy a worry-free summer.

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