Work from Home Or Away?

The BBC reported that the numbers of people working from home are increasing. In fact there are 4.2 million people in the UK that are now working from home! The Office for National Statics, or ONS for short, have said that this figure, which represents 13.9% of the entire workforce, is the highest since records began. 

However Frances O'Grady, the TUC's general secretary said "Too many bosses still don't trust staff to work from home and instead force them to trudge into the office so they can keep an eye on them. Employers' attitudes to new working practices must change to make a much better use of modern technology in all workplaces," she said.

The highest number of people working from home- in fact 63%- are self employed. With advances in technology it can be easier and cheaper to setup from home. It also gives people the chance to test the business to see if they like it before making major financial commitments to pay for an office. There are some disadvantages to working from home. You need to make sure you are disciplined, that you do actually get on and work during the hours you decide on. Equally you need to try and limit your work time to enjoy your home. If your home is noisy you may find that taking phone calls is difficult and may come across as unprofessional. 

A call answering service will present your business in a friendly professional manner. Don’t worry if you have the washing machine on or the kids are shouting in the background when the phone rings, simply call back at your leisure.

Call Answering Service Adds Up Say Accountants

Like many businesses, accountants have deadlines to meet. However when the deadline is for HMRC and your clients will receive fines, the deadlines have a certain amount of pressure attached! At these key times it is important to make sure that their staff can get on with and concentrate on the tax returns they are working on! Let’s face it, nobody wants a mistake during these delicate calculations!

A call answering service allows the accountants to filter out important calls and respond as soon as possible. The calls will all be answered in a professional, polite and friendly manor. A lot of our clients have also mentioned that as well as the service impressing new clients, previous clients feel like the business has expanded! With their own receptionist companies appear to be larger than they perhaps are.

Please contact us for more information and full details of our seven day FREE trial. We offer the following services: brochure sending, diary management, tele-marketing, holiday cover and specialised phone numbers!

How to compete with the big guys!

Enemy of the state is now 16 years old! This film has a line in it that should be a great inspiration to small business owners. "Well, if they're big and you're small, then you're mobile and they're slow. You're hidden and they're exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That's the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time." When you think about it, this is great advice and can be applied to business! Most large businesses are full of red tape and politics. Small business have an advantage in that they can change direction and meet the market needs much quicker. 

Running a small business is a huge juggling act. Many small business owners envy their big rivals for lots of reasons and the biggest reason is generally resources. They generally appear to have lots of staff, huge marketing budgets etc. However how many times have you called a big business and no one has answered the phone? How many times have you left a message and never had a call back? When large businesses employ a lot of people in defined roles they may have two or three reception staff for example answering all the calls. This is great until someone is off sick or on holiday. When the reception teams do not answer the phones, because the calls are stacked up, the system generally bounces the calls into the main offices for the staff to pick up. At this point most of the professionalism is lost. The call is already at 5-6 rings before it bounces to the next person and the person answering the call in the office is annoyed at the phone because it is disturbing them from doing their role within the business. 

Call answering companies are a fantastic solution to this problem for small business owners. A team of professional call handlers will answer your calls for you in your business name. They will answer the call in a polite and professional way and capture all the information you require. They can also help you filter your calls so that only your customers can get through to you. Time is money as they say! 

Google Pay Per Click Missing calls costs you ££££'s. Every local business owner knows that they have to be visible on Google search to achieve the best returns for the business. There are only two ways to achieve this:

Natural Search. This achieved by a lot of hard work and it is worth while employing a Good SEO company to do this for you. There are lots of things that you can do yourself to improve your performance within the rankings. Here are a few basic tips:

Google Places  This takes around 30 minutes to complete and you will need a Google Account -http://www.google.co.uk/business/placesforbusiness/. Make sure that you include good, high quality images (up to 10) and a thorough description of your business. 

Duplicate Content Do not take content from any other site including any that you own yourself. Why would Google show your site to its users if there is nothing original worth seeing on it? 

Quality Content Make sure that you have someone proof read your content. There is nothing worse than spelling and grammatical errors. Google will reward you for good quality content. 

User Friendly This is important for Google and users. You may have seen competitors stuff 300 keywords into the footer but ask yourself does this have a benefit to the end user? If the answer is no then don't do it! 

Server Speed If you are working with tight budgets it can be tempting to cut back on server costs. This is a bad idea! It is true you get what you pay for and servers are no different. No one wants to go to a site that takes ages to load or is constantly down due to server failures.