Are you a small business planning to offer benefits to your current staff or new employees?  Since small businesses often don’t have big budgets to compete with bigger companies on salary, offering employee perks is one way to help bridge the gap, boost morale and improve employee retention rates.
 
Many experts and entrepreneurs have identified some of the best perks that small businesses can offer employees.

1. Educate Them:  There are many perks employers can offer, but one that may fall into the favorite category is tuition reimbursement.  Not only can tuition reimbursement lead to happier employees, but it can also attract higher-quality employees. 
2. Free Food:  While you don’t need an in-house chef, a well-stocked snack pantry and quality     coffee maker can go a lot further than you think.  And, try to veer on the healthier side – you don’t want your team crashing on sugar. 
3. Listening to Employee Needs:  Whether your company is big or small, you need to listen to employee needs and understand the personal challenges they face to do their job well.  Voluntary benefits such as Legal Shield and Legal Estate are benefits that not only can protect their family under stress and future savings.
4. Show Appreciation:  Since most talented employees leave because they don’t feel appreciated, take steps to ensure your best people know how much the company values them.  This is a value can be added by dedicating space in newsletter for employee of the month and planning for team building events. 
5. Health Care: As a small business owner, you have options to offering healthcare for employees or at least providing a resource to delivering the information and tools for registering.  Employers have reimbursement programs and it also creates a tax-deductible expense for the employer.
6. Rewarding Employees with Money:  Small business owners can provide employees with a reimbursement program option.  This allows the employees to use the funds for family day to day expenses or medical. 

Motivating employees with perks doesn’t have to cost a fortune.  What small businesses may lack in corporate advantages; they gain in more closely-knit team.  Fontenot Solutions offers attractive perk solutions 

The world of filming offers a dream career for many people.  Film production is one of the few nationally subsidized media businesses in the United States.  As a business owner, how are you planning for company success?  And as an entrepreneur how will your business services be unique to the industry? 
 
Planning for success in any industry starts with a business plan that includes short-term and long-term goals. To start a film in production company you will need to incorporate or become an LLC.  Once you have incorporated you will need to come up with a script, either by writing it or finding one you want to produce. 
 
Some states offer grants for filming in their areas, but grants will not keep your business moving so you must consider other options for funding.  Topics such as funding should be outlined in detail within your business plan.

When developing a business plan be prepared to incorporate the expected challenges the industry may bring such as taxation, hiring staff and making the proper connections.  Will you bring a partner onboard and if so at what phase of the business?  How will you and the business partner mingle funds into the business. These are questions I encourage you as an entrepreneur to consider before the days turn into months and the months turn into years.

​The Houston Chronicle published a great article about getting started, check it out.   Below are additional links to use in learning more about the industry:

• Breaking into Film and TV business
• How to make a short film with practically no budge​t 

​Fontenot & Associates Solutions LLC can support your start-up budget plan or business plan.

Acquiring new customers is expensive and time-consuming.  As a matter of fact, research shows that attracting new customers is 5X more expensive than keeping your existing customers. One of the most effective ways to increase your revenue is to invest more time with your existing customers.
 
In the early stages of building your business, you use marketing to attract new customers.  Once you land a steady flow of customers, your work has just begun.  As a small business owner, you need to keep customers coming back.  This is why marketing to existing customers is essential for your small business.

Don’t let customer relationships fizzle out after the first sale.  We have identified four methods you can use to invest more into your existing customers and to help keep them coming back.
 
Tip 1: Stay in Contact
Most of the time, your customers are not at your business.  It’s important to stay visible by building brand awareness and marketing when you customers are not around.
 
Tip 2: Address customer needs
When you operate as a small business, you have an advantage over the larger corporations by offering a personal experience.  What problems can your business solve for existing customers?  

Find out what the customer expects as soon as possible.  Ask open-ended questions during your earliest conversations and listen to understand customer perception.  Open-ended questions are those that require something more than just a simple "yes" or "no" in response.  
 
Tip 3: Collect data
Data is gold when it comes to marketing to existing customers.  You can use data to personalize marketing strategies for current customers.
 
Find out your customers’ opinions by collecting feedback.  For example, you could send a follow up email to a customer to ask if they are satisfied with your product or service.  Have a place where customers can submit feedback.  Also, set up a process to let customers know how you fill use feedback. 
 
Tip 4: Add Complementary Services to Existing Products
 Adding complimentary services or products may help you gain new clients, as well as maintain existing ones.  Review the products of your competitors for ideas. 
 
Tip 5: Set up a loyalty program
 A loyalty program rewards existing customers for returning to your business.  Creating a loyalty program also connects customers to your business. 
 
A loyalty program rewards customers for buying from your business.  Set up a loyalty program for your business to encourage customers to keep coming back.  Since they draw current customers back to your business, loyalty programs increase your revenue while rewarding customers.

These are just a few tips on how to get more revenue from your existing customers.  By implementing these simple tips, you will soon see opportunities you can use to develop or enhance your customer service policies and procedures.  The best part about reflecting on your existing processes,  is that your customers will benefit and feel that they are appreciated.

Make this a focus of your marketing efforts and you will soon see the rewards come back in the form of increased referrals and increased sales.

 ​Today in your business, the day to day responsibilities may be moving like a bright beam of light in the sky. Fast. It may be so fast that some weeks your to-do list for the business can appear duplicated because you have not been able to manage the workload and thus prior week’s task gets moved into a new week.

The question then becomes, why? In many cases, it’s not because the task is hard to complete but more so because you did not have the visual reminder that a needed task was to be accomplished. When a checklist is used with operational processes and procedures, checklists can promote standardized work performance to help reduce variances; thus, reducing errors and costs leading to an increase in profits.

​The key to developing checklist is not to include every single item you can think of for your staff or employee to complete - remember, they are professionals in their fields. The goal is to provide a resource of reminders to the most critical and important steps, many times all of what a professional and/or expert needs, even the most highly skilled.

If you think about the industries who presently use them heavily, you may think of healthcare, childcare and crime scene investigators just to name a few. These industries are filled with highly skilled professionals but having a checklist to accompany their day to day responsibilities can literally save lives. They can also do the same for your business. When launching a business, your brain switches gears into overdrive mode because you become so keened finding your ideal clients and building the business.

​As you think about what’s next for your business, don’t forget that the products and services you are developing, marketing and branding are saving lives for individuals and business owners everyday. Thus, your focus should be to implement the proper tools within your business that will allow you to avoid the most common glitches by incorporating checks and balances. ​

Think back to the day you decided to kick-start your own business. The adrenaline was high and the “list of must do” items on your business list was overwhelming to say the least. How great would it have been to have resource tools , such as a checklist, to accompany you through those moments and days of confusion and frustration on what should be your key focus for a few hours, a day or even a week?

Using checklist and your business “to-do list” allows you to schedule activities and not let anything fall through the cracks. So, if you do something time and time again on a daily basis, and you want to do it right every time, create a checklist. In his white paper “Use This Checklist or People Die!”, Jacobson provides this checklist for creating your ideal checklist:
A.  Target areas that are under-performing.
B.  Establish a benchmark for improvement.
C.  Document the sequence of tasks for each involved.
D. Prioritize each task and identify those that are essential.
E.  Identify every area where a decision is made or judgment is required.
F.  Implement a checklist and measure results.
G.  Create a checklist for future edits – don’t assume you will get it right the first time.

Checklist, whether simple or complex have been identified as great tools to improve effectiveness and efficiency. If you feel like you or your employees could do more to optimize their time each day - create a checklist.

Can your business use a checklist? Sure it can.

Take action today and schedule your consultation with Fontenot & Associates Solutions, LLC today.

Whether you sell clothing, hair products or chicken and waffles, stellar customer service will help your business grow.  Great customer service can be the difference between being able to compete and survive and failing for small businesses. 

A company’s reputation is only as good as the customer service it provides.  “The experience that individuals have with a company and then what they hear from friends and family influence their perception of and likelihood to do business with a company,” says Megan Burns, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, a Massachusetts-based research firm that specializes in customer service.  It’s “absolutely an essential moment of truth for companies.”
 
Here are 4 small business tips for delivering a world class customer experience.
 
1.Start with Staff
The most critical person to hire in the customer service scheme of things is the manager. 
As the business owner, you want someone who plans to stick around and aligns with the mission and vision of the business. 
 
2.Use online tools to personalize assistance
Many customers have their first exposure to your business by visiting your website.  The homepage of your website should be welcoming, user friendly and even a bit personal.  Customers like to read bios or social media feed as they take time to decide about making a purchase of product or service.  Online tools such as FAQs are key to connecting with customers and making the best of their experience. 
 
3.Provide local support
Businesses may choose to outsource their customer service calls to call centers for efficiency and to save time but the business owners should not lose sight of the expectations of the customer service experience.  The outsource employees should be trained to communicate with all types of clients.
 
4.Be Willing to find the answer
A customer always deserves an answer and it’s important to always be honest, but never say “I don’t know” unless you follow it with “However, I will find out for you.” – The Balance
 
Company's can do various quick fixes to improve customer service but why not start simple?  Implement new policies and train staff on how to meet company expectations.  This will provide additional clarity to the components of delivering the “WOW” factor in customer service.