Matt Michel, the CEO of the Service Roundtable, has some simple tip for making sure your customers remember doing business with your company.

Some companies work really hard to ensure they are remembered. The employees in these companies are downright creative in their approach. They manage to form a lasting impression that burns the company name into the customer’s consciousness. They generate such an impact that their customers feel compelled to tell their friends and neighbors all about their experience.

These strategies are no secret. Thousands of companies manage to execute them daily.

via 15 Ways To Ensure People Remember You.

You may be surprised how easy it is for you to make a long lasting impression on your customers, and how ready and willing they will be to spread the word about your service.

How many of the tips in Matt’s article is your company guilty of?

Service agreements are a great way to create regular re-occuring revenue streams for your company. But they can be a tough sell.

Your customers need to understand the value of service agreements. When they see how the plan and its benefits will save them time, money, and hassle, your number of service agreements will grow.

via Contracting Business: Establish Value to Boost Service Agreement Sales

Growing and keeping track of these service agreements is key to growth and creating value for your company.

What do you say when asked how many service agreements your company has? Has that number been reviewed? Is it accurate? Is the number of agreements growing, staying the same, or shrinking from year to year? How do you improve the numbers?

Why all these questions? It’s because the heart and soul of a company’s business are service agreements, and growing these agreements leads to growth of the company in service and sales. It’s therefore vital that the value of these agreements be firmly established on a continual basis — both externally and internally.

These service agreements are also what create real value for your company and make it more sell-able. No one is going to buy your list of names when you want to retire. But they may be willing to buy several thousand on-going service agreements.

Owners of small service companies have to make all the hard decisions of what they do themselves and what they delegate. There is always the temptation to try try to do everything yourself, to keep control, to manage the details. This is natural because there is always risk involved in letting other people take over.

But part of being a manager is learning how to effectively delegate. That delegation can be to someone in your company or to another company entirely.

Today lets take a look at payroll. Every company with employees has to do it — usually twice a month.

Every service company owner has to decide if this task is done in house or if the work should be off loaded to a payroll company. Chances are you’re already doing one of the two options. Below is a list of pros and cons for each. Hopefully what you find will support what you’re already doing. But if not, there will also be a few tips on how to make the switch.

Pros of Outsourcing Your Payroll Department

Cost savings – If it costs less to have someone else do it, that’s big check in its favor. Those costs though can come in two forms. First in the traditional quantifiable sense, like wages and software. Secondly, outsourcing payroll can reduce opportunity costs. You can spend the time you once spent worrying about managing payroll on more productive things, like finding new customers or figuring out how to increase the renewal rate on your service agreements.

Flexibility – If your service company is growing, outsourced payroll can be better equipped with the infrastructure and know-how to handle a larger workload.

Cost tracking – You know exactly how much payroll costs when your outsource. You get a bill and can track it easily. With internally managed payroll can be more difficult to know exactly how much the function costs.

Frees up capital – If your company is just getting started or just taking off, outsourcing payroll can usually cost less in the short term than setting up an internal payroll process . This means you can put your money into other parts of your service business that will have a bigger impact on growth and the bottom line.

Best Practices – Chances are you’re not a payroll expert. A good payroll company will deliver the best practice systems, the latest technology and experts to manage it. You can avoid the investment in software and training all together.

Cons of Outsourcing Your Payroll Department

High Costs — It is possible to save money by outsourcing payroll. However, not all payroll companies are created equal. And not all service companies have the same payroll needs. Your company could end up paying more to have another company handle your payroll needs if your process is not too complex. With an outsourced solution, you may end up paying for service you don’t need.

Poor Service – With an outsourced solution, you may not get as quick of a response or as good of service as you’d expect from an employee working in house. You may have to wait for help, or be put on hold, or not have your issues resolved the first time.

Difficult to Access Employee Data – It can sometimes be difficult to access important employee data from outsourced payroll companies. For example, you might want to quickly find out your company’s payroll tax, but the information might not be as readily available as it would be if you had a payroll manager in house.

Data Security – Modern security technology does take care of many of these problems. However, some owners have a difficult time trusting outside companies with vital employee information. Trust is necessary with any outsourced service.

Mistakes Are Harder to Correct – If a payroll mistake occurs, it may take longer to correct the error. In any company, payroll is a sensitive area and some managers might not be comfortable letting outsiders handle it.

Does your company outsource its payroll? What factors would convince you to switch from what you’re doing now to the alternative?

It will be difficult to remember how you were able to run your business without it. ESC minimizes the amount of data entry needed by making sure you only need to enter it once.

ESC will let you get more done, faster. You’ll be able to dispatch service calls, schedule technicians, track inventory, record sales all with ease and precision.

With powerful, build in reports, you’ll be able to track profitability by technician or by customer to see who your best employees and best customers are. With the detailed customer information, you’ll be able to more effectively focus your company’s resources towards the most profitable projects and customers. The information that will be available at your finger tips will make you better equipped to make the best business decisions.

Price matters. So does functionality. With ESC small and medium sized business are able to afford the right solution at the right price. ESC is also scalable, built to grow with your company. And with a 30-day Money Back Guarantee, you’ll be sure to get what you pay for.

The intuitive functionality of ESC will make you feel familiar with the program from the beginning. The screens are designed to help you flow smoothly from one to the next in a way that makes sense for your business.

ESC is not going to change what you call things or the order you do things if they work. Most field names are customizable and there are places you can create custom fields to capture and act on the information that is most important to you. Also, you can customize the way you classify your customers so you are able to nurture and market effectively to your customer and lead base.  ESC gives you the flexibility you need for your business as well as the intuitive framework in which to act.

You can easily import and attach documents to customers, pieces of equipment, particular dispatches or any other record in the system. This will help you clean out and ultimately get rid of those filing cabinets that have been cluttering up your office for all those years.

ESC’s seamless QuickBooks integration will keep your customer and accounting data synchronized and up to date. The set-up wizard completes this process in a few easy steps, and eliminates the need for any double entry.

Mobile solutions get ESC into the hands of your technicians in the field, connecting them to the office and all the information they’ll need to complete their service calls. They’ll be able to see information about their customers, get directions, and find out what tools and parts they’ll need for the job. The mobile solution also keeps techs out of the office and in the field. They can start their day at a customer’s location, rather than with coffee and doughnuts in the office.  That means more service calls in a day and more profit.

When you call you talk to us. We all work out of the same office in Fort Myers, Florida. Our customer support is unmatched. Call us today or download the free trial.

Some businesses grow and other’s stay the same size. Computer service software is one of the keys to growing a service company because it takes the pressure off the owner to be knee deep in the day to day operations and gives him or her a better perspective of the problems and opportunities the company faces.

By having a stronger perspective of how this works, owner are able to use computer service software to automate many of their business functions.

ESC simplifies the management and operations of service companies.

ESC will simplify and organize the work flow of both small and large service companies, making them more manageable and profitable.

It’s easy to collect information from customers; easy to store it. Just write it down on a slip of paper and add it to the pile. Then try to find it when you need it.

Retrieving it:  that’s where ESC comes into play. Rather than the pen, paper, treasure hunt approach, we provide a way for you to enter information once, easily find it again, and have it show up in the other relevant and logical places throughout the software.

Pull everything from your desk and put it into your computer: service scheduling, managing your customers, routing your technicians, and seeing where they are via GPS, invoicing, and collecting payments. These are just a few of the functions, but you can see how it will take everything that is scattered around the office and put it all into one place.

You’ll be able to do more in a day. Enter information once. Access it quickly when you need it. Reduce errors and inconsistent information.

We can also make sure your service technicians in the field are on the same page with access to all the information on the customers they’ll visit, including what equipment they have, repair history, details on what the problem is, and an over view of what they need to do when they arrive. The mobile solution will also make sure your techs know what tools and equipment they’ll need to complete the job, so they’re not scrambling back and forth between the office, warehouse, and job site. They’ll also have detailed directions so they can arrive and start working quickly.

This lets the technicians arrive on the job site and finish the work quicker. And when they’re done, they can go directly to the next job, without having to stop back in the office. This will mean more jobs done per day, which will translate into bigger profits.

With ESC you’ll always be prepared when your customers call. With caller ID, the customers’ information can be pulled up automatically when they call, or you can easily search for them in the system. Once their information is up, you’ll have quick snapshot of the job sites, service history, service contracts, recent dispatches, as well as any outstanding balances. It’s all there so that you’ll be ready when they call.

You’re also able to manage a lot of the software from the web using the ESC Web Front Office, letting you view reports or schedule technicians from anywhere. Also, any changes you make online will show up immediately for users in the office and in the field.

ESC integrates directly with QuickBooks, allowing you to easily post invoices and received payments without any double entry.

By simplifying and organizing the way your company manages its dispatches, customers, and billing, you’ll finally have the time to grow your business by focusing on finding new customers and expanding your relationships with old ones.