Ruth Kirby is an independent IT consultant specialising in IT services, IT applications, internet marketing and strategy. http://www.ruthkirby.org
For small business owners staff productivity is a major issue. We simply cannot afford to have staff hanging around doing nothing. This is particularly difficult in the personal care services industry, e.g. hair salons, dentists, plumbers, nail technicians etc, where generally staff are present in the office waiting for bookings and appointments to occur.
There is an underlying problem which is in the way these businesses have taken on staff in the past and I'll explain. The root of the problem is about aligning costs with revenue streams: only incur costs when there is an associated revenue stream. Sounds simple. In the personal care industry, the main source of costs are typically rent and staff, these are fixed costs which do not change regardless of what is happening to the top line!
So what can we do to transfer to these fixed costs to variable, i.e. make them only occur where there is an associated revenue stream? One idea is to adopt some IT: there are many low-cost online solutions available http://www.reserviz.com whereby a small business can put all of its appointments online and available to registered users. Employees can then logon from home and only turn up in the work place when they have confirmed an appointment which means the employer stops paying them for dead time.
Consultants can benefit as they can use dead time to do something more useful. Customers are happier as they can use the same system to automatically book appointments with their prepared stylist or technician using an on-line interface and email confirmation system.
Overall costs are reduced, the benefit of which could be passed onto employees, shareholders and even customers making for a positive impact all round.
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