Managing a small business involves solving a constant stream of information problems we didn’t know existed, or at least didn’t expect. It does for me, and probably does for you?
One problem we don’t need is organising our information so we can find it when we need it. So we don’t forget important tasks, so we keep focused on executing our plans, so we can sleep nights – because everything we can control is under control.
But that’s a problem small business owner managers like us fight every day.
We keep relationship records in our email, plans in spreadsheets, documents in our filing system and reminders on pieces of paper. Quite naturally there are times when we forget stuff, or at least forget where we put it. Remembering where everything is, and finding it when we forget, is the problem we don’t need. It gets in the way of us winning business, servicing our clients and executing our strategy.
The more successful we get, the less effective we become, because there’s more to remember and more we forget.
Karl Marx described this law of diminishing returns as the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but others had recognised the problem before him. It’s one of the basic laws of economics. Everybody suffers from the same problem but in business we use processes and systems to minimise its impact.
Big businesses embed those processes in ERP software. Small businesses don’t have that option.
That’s why we built Front Office Box. It isn’t rocket science – just an elegant way of storing our business information in context. We also made it easy to use, flexible to cope with most people’s needs and very low cost, both to build and maintain. But that’s the intellectual argument.
What We Can Do For You
Most business people will just want to know how they can solve their own problems with it. So we’ve demonstrated how we solve our business information problems in a series of short videos – keep reading.
Front Office Box doesn’t do anything new. It just does what you would do with an Address Book, spreadsheets, task checklists, and stickies. And by the way it does it in ways which make it easier for you to stay on top of what’s supposed to happen, because we’ve built in the business context. It SIMPLY MAKES SENSE.
Here’s a list of the problems we solve and examples showing how we do it.
Managing My Business Mashup
Like most people these days our business exists in more external relationships than internal – government, banks, business services, social networks, our own sites. These are all web sites of course and our problem starts when we need to find them when we need them. We use External Links to build these connections into our Dashboard, our portal for the Internet.
Email drives my workflow
Email is just the most destructive of systems, interrupting our workflow every few minutes. We forward Emails requiring action to our Dashboard where they sit in a queue until we get around to handling them.
My Problem with Sales Plans
We have a consistent process for planning sales campaigns which is visible to everybody. Its flexible so we can fit the plan to the deal but still keeps everybody on the same page.
Business Planning with Road Maps
For us business planning is a moveable feast. Our markets, opportunities and challenges change every day. We can’t spend months finding out everything before we start planning. Planning with road maps keeps us moving forward in the right direction even though we probably don’t know all the information we need.
Planning and Task Management
Assigning staff to partners, associates, customers or vendors is easy. Remembering who is supposed to do what and when is a lot more difficult. But with milestones, actions, assignments and schedules we have a real time view of what’s supposed to be happening in the business. Nobody needs to remember because the software doesn’t forget.
Seamless Business Process
When a sales deal turns into a customer we don’t have to create another record for delivery or customer service. We just change the category of the plan and the customer history goes along with it. With our setup sales, delivery and customer service are all part of the same system.
Relationships
We can never keep all our relationship information in simple contact lists or email systems. They only do part of the job. So we use Front Office Box to keep all customer, vendor, partner, people records in the one place, complete with addresses, documents, correspondence and notes. And we have Tags to create context for categories and groups.
Prospect List
Spreadsheets are OK for prospect lists, provided all you want to do is add up the numbers, but that’s about where their use ends. Our prospect list is simpler to use, does more for us, and links to our CRM, Sales Plans, Sales Pipeline and our peoples schedules.
CRM
We really don’t need all that complexity and control you get with typical CRM systems. We don’t need to constrain what people do and reports only tell us what we already know. For our CRM we just need relationships, plans, assignments and schedules – sort of CRM lite and that’s what we get with Front Office Box.
ToDo Lists
Checklists on Stickie notes or in spreadsheets, or in Tasks only get us so far. They don’t tie in to our planning. We can’t easily share them and they’re always out of date. We keep our ToDo and other Checklists in Front Office Box because that way we can solve those problems.
Sales Pipeline Management
There’s no effective way of managing sales pipelines without a specialist tool. Forget spreadsheets – they’re not meant for this job, and don’t work at all effectively. We want to manage our sales pipelines, so we need a system – flexible yet consistent, comprehensive yet simple – that just works, and stays out of our way.
Do You Have Other Information Problems?
Let us know and we’ll make videos of how we solve them. There are lots more we solve for ourselves with Front Office Box but we’ve forgotten what they are, because they aren’t problems anymore.
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Check out our Tutorials at the top of this page and for Successful Sales Management implement these ideas with Front Office Box.
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