Log Book Timesheet Blog

How do you account as to where your time goes into? What about the people who work for you? How do your clients feel about the labour rate charged to them or the number of hours billed?

Knowing who does what and where, is the key to run any parts and labour business successfully. Here comes the internet and the incredible connectivity it brings.

There is no longer any excuse for not knowing where your people have been, what they did and how long it took them to complete the task.

Some businesses feel they are compelled to charge the standard rates in their industry no matter who performed the task. Customers also have set expectations as to how long it should take to do a given job. So why bother to account for everything you may ask?

The answer is that unless you have some track record of where the company hours have disappeared, you will never find out what is profitable and what is not. Furthermore in a competitive world the last thing you want is to be drawn into a price war where people undercut one another to gain market share. This game of Russian roulette will eliminate all participants until the biggest loser is found.

You need to differentiate what your business does how it does it and create value for the customer. Once the benefits are clearly spelled out, a fair price is your reward.

Have you ever considered that your invoice might turn out to be your best piece of marketing for repeat business?

What about if customers could log online and check the progress of a job in terms of billable hours? Is it better to work onsite to pacify a nosey customer or in your office where you can allocate junior staff and coach them at the same time?

So we have 3 stake holders here: the company manager, the staff and the customers who are no longer kept in the dark... All these people can all use the same online system with different access levels to see only what they ought to see or enter the time spent as soon as a task is done - even away from the office just using a smartphone!

Wow! Logbook is such an online system built from scratch for a given organisation and now made available to a wider audience. Why re-invent the wheel? Why wait until everything is perfect? That will never happen... check out the logbook screencast for yourself.

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How many facilitators does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one - but the lightbulb has got to really want to change...

It looks like a lot of folks in the corporate world have to be taught how to live again. If you treat people like people and not like computers you get to empower them to be their best. People can only perform if you trust them and believe in them. Working with people is risky. Corporations want to avoid risk at all costs... but there is no such thing as a safe investment. Investments provide a return commensurate with your ability to take risks. That is also true with people.

The safest way to be in business is to be a one person band. It is also the most limiting because you cannot delegate or leverage other people's skills.

As you add more people to an enterprise you discover that the productivity of the whole is not increasing as you thought. If you take on an associate you do not double your productivity - rather you just multiply it by the square root of the number of people involved.

The gap is called, red tape, administration costs, bureaucracy, unproductive layers... instead of firing emails across everybody's desktop why don't you walk down the aisle and compliment somebody on their demeanour. You think that's unproductive? Maybe you've got the wrong set of metrics. Your key performance indicators are not performing and you are the last one to find out...

Just like plants need light and carbon dioxide, people need rapport and empathy. Did they teach you that when you did your MBA? How much easier is it to work with friends than enemies?

Some bosses wrongly assume that because their staff spend 40+ hours a week in the next cubicle they can read their mind. But why would they have the business best interest at heart if their own interests are not met first?

People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. Introducing the social balance sheet. Instead of bragging to the stock exchange about your assets and liabilities tell us about how many lives in your workforce you have turned around for the better.

You are not a philanthropic organisation? As an employer you have a social responsibility towards the welfare of all those who offer you their time and expertise. It is in fact your best self-interest. Nothing has changed since the days of Dale Carnegie's book "How to win friends and influence people." Or you could quote the words of Christ: "Love your neighbour as yourself."

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Ever wondered what could make you remarkable in the marketplace? Beyond price or product can you think of how to make the customer experience memorable?

If people reach you online how can you make their visit something to talk about? A satisfied customer is the best form of advertising as the saying goes.

There are reasonable one-size-fits-all website packages out there claiming to do everything you need for a pittance. Well, maybe so... but how can you differentiate yourself if your competitors also run the same plain-vanilla website engine?

It will take more than flashy graphics or slow-loading audio or video to make your mark. What about if you were able to go beyond the customer expectations?

If you are a retail outlet, free delivery is a token of trust. You absorb freight charges in your general costs and clients are relieved that they won't be penalised if they live in such and such postcode.

Taking it one step further - can you integrate your offerings with some calculating module to assess online each customer needs or expectations? Mortgage repayments, dieting plans come to mind. What about a surface calculator if you are selling carpet or paint or wallpaper?

If you are a hotel or a resort what about featuring a plan of your establishment? As you click on each room an image reveals how the place is furnished and if you click further on the window the exact view from that room scrolls on the screen. Click again to see the prices offered for different days and the availability.

Are you worried your competitors might check your site to find your occupancy rate? They already do and if not they can always use dummies to pose and report to them. But don't you think that sort of fingertip tell-me-more-as-I-go service will get people to talk about you? Even if people copy you it would be a mark of success and you would become an instant trendsetter. You can't beat that sort of reputation. Think what it could do for your "brand"...

A designer website is what your business deserves and if you have to change your procedures in the process why not. If you consider the cost of getting people to reach your web address why not make the most of the opportunity once they get there?

Go for a weekend away and conceptualise in your mind what the best customer experience could be. There is always room to streamline your office procedures. If that can be captured within the website then fulfilling rather than goofing orders should be the expected outcome - both for yourself and your valued (returning?) clients. Check out Bruno Deshayes's Web Designs

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If you are charging your time or expertise for a living you know how disconcerting it can be for a client to receive their bill. How can they have the assurance that what they are being charged for is value for money? How can they be re-assured that their bill is a truthful account of work actually performed?

The answer is to let them know what is happening. Instead of waiting for the end of the month to cause them to fall off their chair when they finally get your invoice why not giving them real-time access to your timesheets? Scary thought? Not really. Either you are tweaking the real hours you spent on that assignment or your hourly rate is too high because you don't want to admit how long you actually spent on this task.

People simply like to be told the truth and if you spent 10 hours on a job and are only charging 5 that is to be documented. If the senior partner could have done the job in two hours at a high hourly rate but a new graduate staff took twice as long at bottom price it is worth letting the client know.

Some IT providers are so fidgety about their charging issues that they send their employees to work on location when they might as well have performed their task remotely from the office with peer review. The idea is that if the client sees a member of our team at their premises they will have some good subliminal feeling that we are really working on their job.

What a lot of hogwash! Who do you think you are kidding? Trust is lacking here. The best way to clear the air about justifying your time and your rates as a provider is to be pro-active by providing the logs of who did what and where. LogBook is such a web application where your clients can see your timesheets. Later they can also see how much time was charged and at what rate. They can see if the project is still under budget or not. You might have agreed that the project will not cost more than x dollars and that any overtime will be borne by you. You might also charge hardware components or software subscriptions as part of your service.

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Being your own boss! What a grand idea! The moment you step out in faith into your future, opposition is sure to arise. If you don't believe in yourself no one else will. Here are some practical issues you must address before you run out of puff.

Adversity can be the best motivator but going off at a tangent is a real danger too. In order not to be out of kilter you will have to juggle 3 roles: the marketer, the engineer and the accountant. Most people who venture out on their own have either the first or second bias. Rarely would a beancounter start out into business except to setup a public accounting practice of course.

The questions you have to ask yourself are: Where would my customers come from? What unique product or service can I offer that would make me stand out from the crowd? How long can I last before my first sale? Do I need a second job to keep my cash flow until the business takes off?

Being your own boss requires the ability to critique yourself, question the obvious and investigate alternative routes. Let us review the 3 segments you have to balance:

The world is replete with great dreamers who are starving to death because nobody else caught on to the value of their dream. Unless you find customers - people who are eager to trade cash for what you offer - commercially, you do not exist. Women tend to have an advantage here because they are usually well connected through children at school, etc...Who will spread a good word for you? Will your Facebook friends turn out to be real friends or silly bystanders? Will you erect a sign by the main highway to drive a path to your door?

What is unique about my product or service? If you do not have a bullet proof answer to that question you are just a me-too, competing solely on price. Do what hasn't been done before. Do something people will remember and talk about. In the fast paced western world it's all about convenience and time-savers. People don't have servants (maybe they should) but they are happy to pay for someone to mow their lawn, walk their dog, do minor repairs in the house, wash their laundry, etc... is your business proposition bound to your geographical location or can you generate business from elsewhere?

Finally you are in business to make a profit. Your profit is the difference between what people pay you and what you have to spend to meet their expectations. Unless you keep a keen eye on the figures you have no way of knowing whether you are moving ahead or falling behind. Can you charge more for what you do? Can you spend less on what you have to buy? A sense of accounting will keep the dreamer's feet securely on the ground!

To find an online coach to set your business goals click here
To find an online cashflow forecast and bookkeeping service click here

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