One of the goals I’ve had since day one with my consulting company is to run as lean and efficiently as possible. One of the most simple things that I adhere to in that philosophy is to attempt to prevent any expenses from being generated that are not directly covered by generation of some form of revenue. Does this mean I have to work harder on occasion? Absolutely, but it also forces me to work smarter. When we started to grow beyond the ability for me to service all of our customers directly, I had to work hard on how to make sure my clients were covered. It took some doing, but I came up with a number of ways to limit the need to be there to service my clients.
- Since day one, I’ve employed our Monitoring and Remote Backup platforms to reduce the number of calls I get from clients because I know of problems before they do. The remote backups have also kept me from having to follow my clients and ensure that they were replacing tapes or managing any part of their system backups.
- Remote access software is another key component. Depending on the severity of the issue, I can perform the task at my leisure, after hours if need be, and managed multiple tasks at one time. This has always been a part of my service, but something I have begun to rely on more heavily as the business has grown. I always wanted to make sure I had a lot of face time with my clients, but I’m learning that it isn’t always possible, and the most important part is to provide the best service possible.
- Outsourcing. Yes, the dreaded outsourcing, but frankly, it’s much more economical to use another company to perform certain tasks than to try and hire an employee. Most of the work is handled through another local firm where several of my old friends work. This gives them a level of trust for some of my more sensitive and complex projects. I’ve also used OnForce for various simple tasks. The ability to pay a flat fee is very attractive as you never know the real quality of the technicians on OnForce.
- Single cycle management for all customers. All our customers receive the same services on the same days, as far as scheduled updates, scheduled managed service reports, billings, etc. This allows me to focus on one thing at a time while managing my clients. I can sit down and generate invoices for all my clients and not have to worry that I’m also supposed to perform an upgrade or some other service that same night.
- Integration and single entry. All the products I use, from our Firewall, to the monitoring system, to our CRM to Quickbooks, are integrated together. If the Firewall generates an alert, it will be passed to our monitoring system, which will then open a ticket in the CRM. Once the ticket is closed in the CRM it will clear the monitoring alert, and then once billing time comes around the information will automatically be entered into Quickbooks. I can really only begin to imagine the amount of time this saves me per month in dual data entry costs.
- Customer Information Management. All of my customer network information is stored in a Wiki, with access limited to local users and people connecting to our datacenter via VPN. This information is shared between my companies staff and the company that we outsource with, so there is never any question as to what a configuration or password might be. We even have penalties setup with the outsourced company if information isn’t entered into our Wiki.
My company is still growing, but I feel I’ve generated a very efficient and scalable backend that will allow me to quickly adapt to any volume needs that may arise, until which time I feel it would be fortuitous to begin to hire more employees to interface with our clients. Now I just need to get the sales process tuned, and the cycle period shortened, so we can add more clients even faster.