Mailplus

Discounted website offer for Mailplus customers

admin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:41:59 +0000

Get a new website for your business from the people who designed this website

Available exclusively to Mailplus customers and for a limited time. Get the website your business needs for success in the Information Age – at a 50% discount!

Enjoy the flexible option that best suits your business needs:

Starter site – a basic website that looks great
Brand builder – a bespoke website that sets your brand apart from the competition
Total web solution – a bespoke website plus a content management system

Of course, we also offer search engine optimisation and online marketing solutions are also available at great rates.

Contact Charles Lloyd at Alexandra@charleslloyd.net or 02 9212 1448 today to begin building your business brand better for the 21st Century.

Franchising – self-funding growth and customer care factor

admin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:38:25 +0000

It’s been said that by 2050 over 60% of Australia’s businesses will be franchised. Currently over 18% of Australia’s GDP is already derived by way of over 1,300 franchise systems already in operation.

So, can franchising work for your business?
Let’s start with the benefits of a franchise model:
- Motivation– when it’s their own business, operators find it easier to get out of bed in the morning
- Care factor – owner-operators find it easier to put a smile on their face when faced with a difficult situation or customer
- Speed of growth – the sale of franchise territories generates capital which can be immediately reinvested in the underlying business
- Annuity income – beyond initial franchise fees royalties can continue to provide regular income for many years
- International expansion – the market for a successful business is not limited to local buyers – many small business people have made their fortune by taking a good franchise business overseas

Mailplus is an excellent example of a franchised business where owner-operators have added much-needed motivation and care factor to a customer-centric service business.
Picking up and delivering mail, parcels and banking on behalf of other business effectively requires speed and attention to detail in equal measure. When company owned operators failed to deliver the highest levels of customer service, Mailplus turned to franchising and with excellent outcomes.
Not only did Mailplus achieve unrivalled levels of customer service, but they also expanded their network to a national footprint in a very short time.
Now the rest of the world awaits.

Increasing customer service with speed

admin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:20:18 +0000

A great many of Australia’s 850,000 (or thereabouts!) small-to-medium sized businesses are services businesses. That is, they do things for people and other businesses they can’t, or don’t have time to do for themselves.

So what makes a great services business?

One that delivers their service at good quality at a fair price and in short time.
It’s fair to say that in today’s world, customers expect all three. But it’s also fair to say that people focus too much on cost and quality and not enough on speed.

There are great advantages to be found in delivering faster service and also great opportunities open to achieving it. Where to start looking for easy wins in delivering speed to your customers?

Here are a few places to start looking for those valuable time saving solutions:

Outsourcing – if we got someone else to do some of the job could we get it done faster and then charge more?
Change of process – if we changed the way we do things can we achieve better outcomes (so often we keep doing things because ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’ – madness!)
Change of responsibility – if we transferred the tasks to a different team member could we get faster results? For example an up-and-comer in the business looking to make their mark might simply get things done in less time.
Change of rules – The expression goes ‘if you give it a week, it’ll take a week’. So, how about cutting the agreed delivery time frame for core tasks? You’ll be pleasantly surprised to see just how much faster things happen when the rules say they have to.

Time is money so save time and you’re already making more money!

Reducing business costs in a small-to-medium sized business (SMB)

admin — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:18:30 +0000

There is a not a business in the world that’s not looking for ways to reduce operating costs. There are however many businesses looking for answers in all the wrong places.
Printing double sided and catching the train instead of a taxi are genuine cost saving measures, but not ones that are likely to make a meaningful difference to your business’s bottom line.
Bottom line – When looking to save money it really does pay to look from the top down. The largest costs facing a business are typically RENT and PEOPLE.
RENT is a relatively complex cost to control – but a great way to minimise it is to look at sub-letting to like-minded businesses. Very often synergistic businesses that share space achieve mutually optimal outcomes.

When it comes to PEOPLE the cost of staff is not only their salary, their super, their payroll tax and their worker’s compensation insurance – it’s also the cost of their desk, travel, phones, computer, software and so on.

Have you ever noticed how when a staff member leaves you can often cope just as well without them? The saving of several thousand dollars a month (PLUS ASSOCIATED OVERHEADS) means you can also explore paying specialist services providers to take up the slack.
With the savings of one less full-time person you can hire in many flexible solutions (you’ll have thousands of dollars a month extra on hand). And, when you outsource the task, you also outsource the associated costs!

So, people maketh the business, but they can also breaketh the business.
In many cases; less really is more.

How to identify outsourcing opportunities for your Small Business

admin — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 06:48:51 +0000

Outsourcing is so important for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) in these tough economic times. The challenge is finding the balance between things you should outsource rather than keep doing yourself. The common belief that ‘it’s cheaper if we do it ourselves is often mistaken’.

Here are three tips you can start using today to help you improve the efficiency of your business:

Imagine you’re moving office
To quickly identify what you could outsource, imagine you are moving office. What is it that your new office will give you the competitive edge or allow you to find new business opportunities (core)? Anything else should be on the ‘potential to outsource’ list.

To prioritise your list you can look at it financially (cost / benefit) or simplicity (distraction / benefit). Simplicity tends to be the nest guide for most SMBs.

Explain it to a 5-year old
A simple way of thinking about what to outsource is to use the tactic of: “Can I explain it to a 5-year old?” For most small-to-medium businesses that’s a great place to start. Anything more and you will need a scope of services agreement thicker than War & Peace that explains obligations, service standards, intellectual property rights, where to send notices and much more. How about starting with the mail run?

Cheap, fast, or good: Pick any two
You’ve probably heard the saying: “…cheap, fast, or good; pick any two…”. Be careful of suppliers who profess to be all three, it will be short lived. If you are outsourcing an essential task you want it to be reliable. If it’s a regular service, the people providing the service should be like an extended member of your office team.

Outsourcing may be an expression that a clever professor came up with some years ago. The simple truth – it’s businesses specialising in what they believe they do best. What’s your focus?

Next Steps

Our daily errand services are designed to save your business time and money. From mail pick up and delivery to express banking our team of friendly owner operators are here to help. Start your free trial today or contact us to discover how Mailplus can change the way you do business.