Two Ways to Boost Sales in a Recession

During a recession, businesses and consumers alike are more likely to analyze where they spend their money, so you have to work hard to earn their business. Here are two major ways to get new customers stepping through your doors and coming back for more.

1) Use Non-traditional Marketing
Direct marketing is nothing new, but businesses are increasingly turning to non-traditional media because it’s less expensive than traditional advertising mediums (like television and radio) and can be tailored to reach a small or large target demographic. Direct marketing campaigns like fliers, street advertising, promotional letters, coupons, customer appreciation events, and direct selling have become very popular among businesses during the recession.

The more clever your campaign, the more likely it is to succeed. For instance, PETA’s 2009 Super Bowl advertisement was banned for being too sexually explicit. It is widely presumed that PETA intentionally made the ad overly explicit with the intention of creating word-of-mouth publicity, which is even more valuable than airtime during the Super Bowl. The supposed “plan” worked – PETA’s commercial was spoofed on television shows like The View, and copies of the video floated around the Internet virally for months. PETA also avoided the $3 million it cost in 2009 for 30 seconds of Super Bowl air time. By understanding how the marketing world works, PETA earned almost free major national publicity.

2) Use Technology
Social media sites and text messages are great ways for you to keep in touch with your employees (TimeForge offers great schedule notification options through social media and sms), but technology can also offer huge pools of potential customers. Advertise online and make sure your business has professional accounts on sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

Check reviews of your business from the Better Business Bureau, Company Name Sucks, and Angie’s List. Be proactive with review information and use it in your next staff meeting to improve your product.

Make sure your company’s website is accessible and interactive so customers will return, and consider offering an online newsletter or blog with coupons or other incentives.

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Messaging with TimeForge

Communication is key in the fast paced environment of your business.  Communicating with staff can be frustrating, whether you’re attempting to inform them of policy changes or just trying to fill a shift for this afternoon.

Miscommunication among staff members, or between staff and management, can leave you frantically trying to fill a shift only minutes before it begins, calling employee after employee, ultimately ending up short-handed, an hour behind on your managerial tasks, and pulling your hair out.

However, with TimeForge‘s unique messaging feature, those days are gone.

To send a message, select "Messages" under the "Schedules" tab, then click "Send a Message"

TimeForge’s labor management software offers a convenient communication feature (similar to e-mail or text messages) within the TimeForge system to make staff communication convenient and time saving. Now, rather than taking the time to call employees while on the clock, you can send messages specifically to the person, people, or groups you need to contact. You can choose to send the message to selected staff or management members, unscheduled or scheduled employees, the entire staff, or just certain positions or departments.

When sending a message, select which staff members you want to send the message to.

TimeForge even takes care of the “I didn’t get the memo” excuse, so you don’t have to worry about staff members failing to check their TimeForge messages (or to answer their phones). All TimeForge messages are also sent to the recipients email, and an audit log is provided inside of TimeForge for users who view the message in TimeForge, ensuring that they “get the memo”.  Messages also show up inside of Facebook, on mobile devices like Android phones and iPhones or iPads, and through an RSS feed.

TimeForge’s messaging feature helps you spend less time managing labor and more time ensuring that the business runs smoothly, saving the company money and reducing turnover by increasing communication among the staff and management.

Sign up for a free trial today and see what TimeForge can do for you!

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Four Ways to Be the Best Manager

As a manager, your main value to your company is your influence. Good managers influence their company far more than average employees by trickling ideas both down and up the ladder. Mary Kay Ash once said, “People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make and difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.”

If people are the greatest asset of a company, then a good manager is invaluable. Here are four ways to help you be the best manager you can be:

1. Pay attention to improving your company’s competitive advantage. Remind employees that the first law of business is “take care of the customer”. Encourage your employees to innovate and create to prevent your competitors from having better ideas than you. In the hospitality industry, it’s easy to get caught up in the mundane repetitiveness of day-to-day activities. Spice it up by incorporating a “new ideas” segment into weekly staff meetings. Quality of product, quality of service, and overall quality of experience must be exemplary in the hospitality industry in order to prevent loss of your customer base to a competitor. Ensure rewards for employee efficiency.

2. Diversify! To make sure your company has a solid ladle of the melting pot, hire people of every age range, race, ethnicity, and gender. By 2060, half of the American population will be made up of ethnic and racial minority groups. Also, familiarize yourself with global cultures, especially if your company plans to expand internationally. It is important to diversify your employee pool in order to not only keep up with your customer base, but also to ensure the organizational strength of your company by maximizing the diverse contributions that you will only get by having a diverse employee pool.

3. Technology is your friend – use it! Spending on retail software will exceed $20 billion by 2014. Technology has transformed industries and changed the very nature of business. Minimally, e-business practices will reduce your cost of communication. If used effectively, e-business technologies can have a far greater positive impact on your profit margin through accelerated decision making, broadened communication, expedited handling of employee and store issues, more thorough hiring practices, and the many benefits project and employee management software can offer. If you incorporate the right management software in your business, scheduling, tracking, communication, and hiring employees can be faster, easier, and considerably more efficient financially.

4. Don’t forget yourself. While managing in the fast paced hospitality industry, it can be easy to compartmentalize your life – home life and work life need not intertwine. This can be beneficial to your sanity, but it can make you feel like two different people. When making decisions at work, be sure to remind yourself who you are and what your ethics dictate. In today’s high pressure climate in one of the most competitive industries, the need to meet quotas and deadlines can leave you facing some major ethical dilemmas. Consider the implications of your decisions, and whether the decision fits into your life plan. Be sure that your company’s culture fits your compass of ethics, as it can be difficult to juggle bosses, subordinates, your daily workload, and two conflicting sets of rules.

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Managing Breaks and Meal Periods Is Simple

In many states, employees receive paid or unpaid break periods and meal periods according to the law. The TimeForge Breaks Module allows management to enter rules which manage employee breaks and meal periods, letting you easily control and track breaks for on-duty or scheduled employees. After enabling the Breaks Module, you’ll be ready to customize your break and meal period options so they are tailored to best suit your company’s needs.

Scheduling Breaks:

You can add your state, federal, or company mandated “Break Rules” or “Meal Period Rules” and delegate whether the break is paid or unpaid, optional or required.

After adding the necessary breaks, TimeForge can automatically place employees on the schedule and will stagger the breaks to keep employees from all taking the breaks at the same time.  Alternatively, managers can specify each break individually.

When using TimeForge Breaks in conjunction with TimeForge Scheduling, you can:

  • Specify breaks based on hours worked, position, or duration of work scheduled
  • AutoScheduler™ can quickly stagger breaks for each scheduled shift
  • Schedule and manage both paid and unpaid, and optional and required breaks
  • Print break reports and worksheets to track employee signatures

Taking Breaks:

Employees can begin or end their breaks with the click of a button.  You can set options to allow employees to take breaks based on the scheduled break settings, specify all breaks as a certain type, or staff can select what kind of break they will be taking (paid, unpaid, optional, required).  If preferred, you can print out the break worksheet and capture employee signatures for any waived or new breaks.

By using TimeForge Breaks in conjunction with TimeForge Attendance, management can:

  • Track employee breaks (paid, unpaid, optional, required) for labor reporting
  • Automatically take breaks based on the schedule if staff forget to break in or out
  • Simple one-click conversion of unpaid breaks to paid breaks (and vice versa) in the “Edit Attendance” module
  • Real time web and mobile view of labor and tracking of which staff members are on break
  • Alerting and Reporting with TimeForge automatically staggers employees breaks when you add them to the schedule, so your business is always covered by capable staff.

Because the reality (attendance) is often different from the scheduled breaks, you can also see a display of employee breaks based on the employee’s scheduled hours with our Break Report, and track breaks that employees have taken, or should take, based on the employee’s scheduled work hours with our printed Break Worksheet Report. Our detailed and comprehensive reports make it simple and organized to view employee habits and work histories.

You can opt to be alerted via text, e-mail, or TimeForge message if staff members do not take their scheduled breaks after a certain number of minutes. For example, if you set the alert to notify you after 15 minutes of a missed break and an employee was scheduled to take a break at 1:00 pm, but has not taken a break at 1:15 pm, you’ll receive a notification via e-mail or text message directly to your phone or computer.

TimeForge is a best-of-breed employee management system, and our online application of the program allows for constant software updates and improvements live to your system. With TimeForge’s innovative online management software, you are always at the top of your game. TimeForge completes tasks like managing breaks in a matter of minutes – saving your company valuable capital.

TimeForge’s do-it-all program makes the headache of managing employee breaks a thing of the past. Sign up for a free trial today!

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Going Green is Good for Profits

Lately, everyone has been going crazy for “going green”. While some business owners are dismissing the rapidly growing trend as a fad, many savvy business owners are learning how to capitalize on the environmentally-conscious movement among younger workers. It is important for businesses to recognize that Generation Y is particularly sensitive to Green efforts, and (as our Marketing to Generation Y blog mentioned) is spending $150 billion dollars annually on expenses such as food, drinks, and entertainment.

Changes to make your business more environmentally friendly will:

  • Improve your employee retention rate of environmentally-conscious Gen Y (and older generations’) staff members
  • Allow you to capitalize on the 70 million individuals looking to spend their money in “Green” establishments. According to a recent study by Forrester Research, nearly 40% of Gen Y-ers are willing to pay more for products or services that are environmentally friendly.

When you are ready to take the next steps to make your business Green, the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) is a national non-profit organization that provides a convenient and cost-effective way for restaurants, manufacturers, distributors, and consumers to become more environmentally responsible. According to case studies by the GRA, businesses that they have assisted have had the following savings:

  • After only one year since their GRA certification, The Draft House reported a 54% water reduction and a trash reduction of 50%.
  • GustOrganics, the first certified Organic restaurant in New York State received free publicity from The Today Show, Telemundo, CNN, The New York Times, Financial Times and more after becoming GRA certified.
  • Boston restaurant Taranta eliminated almost all garbage with recycling and composting program, and enjoyed savings of $1,300 per year by switching from paper towels to an energy-efficient hand dryer.
  • “I realized about a 45% return on my investment in one year and cut approximately $1200 off my annual operating costs. Not only am I pleased with the financial results of my decision, I also know that my association with the GRA has inspired employee morale.” – Jim Solomon, Fireplace Restaurant.

Going Green will help your business save money, reduce employee turnover, generate positive publicity and increase your sales. For more information on going Green or getting your restaurant GRA certified, click here.

TimeForge can help your business take the first step to becoming green with our online labor management products.  Our software will help you dramatically reduce the amount of paper required for you to run your business by removing the paperwork overhead needed for common HR needs.

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New Hire at TimeForge

Something a little different for us in this blog post … a testimonial from one of our own staff members!

At TimeForge, we use our own product for scheduling staff, clocking in and out, enforcing the schedule, and staff communication. In the world of technology, this is often called “eating your own dogfood“, and it ensures that if there are critical bugs, or if some new feature doesn’t work – we know immediately, and we feel the same pain that you, our customers, feel (talk about a great reason to fix something!).

A few weeks back, we hired Morgan, an aspiring soccer athlete and summer intern to help answer the phones, respond to emails, and expand our online labor management manual to help our customers manage their labor. Morgan has friends who are doing all sorts of summer jobs, working in grocery stores, life guarding, waiting tables, bar tending, etc… She hears their complaints about staff scheduling, requesting time off, and all of the other issues that go along with being managed (or managing) at your place of employment.

After using TimeForge for about a week, she had this to say about our product line …

This is my first week working here at TimeForge and I have learned that this software is an easier way for both employees and managers to do scheduling, request shifts, clock in and out, and view your time card.

I have many friends who work at retail and grocery stores and they request time off by using a request book. When managers use a request book, it usually takes hours of time to go through everything. After declining or accepting the employees request you have to reschedule and switch swifts for the staff members. Instead, with TimeForge, it only takes a few minutes to do all the rescheduling. Employees log on and request time off, or swap shifts. TimeForge can communicate with management with TimeForge messaging or email, keeping everyone in the loop. You can also receive text messages reminding staff members when to be at work, just so they don’t “forget“.

I have also learned that staff can view their time cards on TimeForge. Your time card shows the amount of hours you worked, the days you worked, and your hourly wage. My friends have also told me that when they clock in, they first have to go to the service counter and they will highlight your name to show management when you worked. With TimeForge all you have to do is log in and click “clock in”, and that’s it! TimeForge saves everyone’s time and it helps get things done quickly.

We can work at marketing and selling TimeForge all day long, but that’s about as powerful of a testimonial as it gets – from someone who has only used our software for a few days.

If you happen to call our offices, and get in touch with Morgan, make sure to say hello!

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7 Ways Turnover Costs You and Your Business

Management Philosophy 101 for dealing with staff turnover: The best way to reduce turnover costs is to reduce turnover.

The real cost of employee turnover is difficult to fully quantify because it is based on many variables but it is always more than you think it is.

In the restaurant, retail and hospitality industries, turnover is especially high – but, TimeForge, a labor management solution, can improve staff morale and efficiency in order to effectively reduce turnover and improve your bottom line. One way to find the cost of turnover at your business would include the following, some of which are hard to measure:

  1. Lost productivity – Other staff members will have to pick up the slack of a missing employee, which reduces everyone’s overall productivity.
  2. Temporary cost of replacement (i.e., contractor wages) – Some positions can be filled by others picking up the slack, resulting in no incremental expense. However, if this is a frequent occurrence, morale can suffer — leading to more turnover. Other positions will need to be filled with temporary or contract workers, which results in additional cost.
  3. Recruiting/hiring expense – This is the literal cost of filling the position and can include search fees paid to agencies or headhunters, referral fees paid to employees, ads in newspapers, job board posting fees, etc.
  4. Management time – Time management has to spend going over resumes, scheduling and conducting interviews, evaluating candidates and making job offers. TimeForge can slash the time spent collecting and storing a new hire’s documentation, but interviewing and evaluating applicants is a time-consuming skill that remains unavoidable.
  5. Training costs – This includes all the costs associated with ensuring that new staff members have all the skills and tools they need to do the job.
  6. Learning curve – The time it takes the new employee to perform at an optimal performance level.
  7. Knowledge replacement – This is impossible to measure. Employees leave with accumulated knowledge that is hard to quantify and even harder to replace.

For an even more accurate and comprehensive determination of costs, include the following where appropriate:

  1. Calculate the cost of training your company has invested in the employee leaving. Include internal training, external programs and external academic education. Include licenses or certifications the company has helped the employee obtain to do their job effectively.
  2. Calculate the impact on departmental productivity because the person is leaving. Who will pick up the work, whose work will suffer, what departmental deadlines will not be met or delivered late?
  3. Calculate the cost of department staff and include discussion on their reactions to the vacancy.
  4. Calculate the cost of losing customers that the employee is going to take with them, or the amount it will cost you to retain the customers of the sales person or customer service representative who leaves.
  5. Calculate the cost of drug screens, educational and criminal background checks and other reference checks, especially if these tasks are outsourced. Don’t forget to calculate the number of times these are done per open position, as some companies conduct this process for the final two or three candidates.
  6. Calculate the cost of the various candidate pre-employment tests to help assess a candidate’s skills, abilities, aptitude, attitude, values and behaviors.
  7. Calculate the cost of supervisory time spent in assigning, explaining and reviewing work assignments and output. This represents lost productivity of the supervisor. Consider the amount of time spent at seven hours per week for at least eight weeks.
  8. Calculate the cost of coworkers and supervisory lost productivity due to their time spent on bringing the new employee “up to speed.”
  9. Calculate the cost of mistakes the new employee makes during this elongated indoctrination period.
  10. Calculate the cost of bringing the new person on board, including the cost to put the person on the payroll, establish computer and security passwords and identification cards, business cards, internal and external publicity announcements, telephone hookups, cost of establishing e-mail accounts, costs of establishing credit card accounts, or leasing other equipment such as cell phones, automobiles, pagers.
  11. Calculate the cost of a manager’s time spent developing trust and building confidence in the new employee’s work.

Research continues to show that real turnover costs can run anywhere from 25% to 150% of the position’s salary and benefits, depending on how many of the above costs are applicable to the position.

TimeForge can help reduce your turnover by providing staff and management a superior means of communication, keeping everyone “in the know” at all times. TimeForge reduces turnover by:

  • No more confusion! Keeping employees from being scheduled at times they are unavailable, and communicating schedule and availability changes to staff and management alike.
  • Easy communication! Making online shift swaps, pickups, and time off requests a one-click process (with manager’s approval where necessary, of course)
  • Easily Accessible! Web-based, text message, facebook, and printable schedules, time cards, and upcoming shift reminders.
  • And much, much more!

The number one reason management-level staff members resign is the time, pain and high rate of error that comes with their job including constructing employee schedules – an issue that TimeForge makes obsolete. As opposed to inefficient and cumbersome Excel spreadsheets and paper logs, TimeForge will save management hours and virtually eliminate errors each week in various HR duties, including documentation/certification creation, storage and sending, schedule construction, and all of their various employee management tasks.

Money spent proactively on employee training, staff morale, career development, staff-management communication and other benefits can have significant return on investment when it leads to reduced turnover, and TimeForge reduces the time and cost associated with accomplishing these vital employee hiring and retention techniques.

TimeForge makes building schedules, tracking attendance, exporting and approving payroll and much more a fast, easy, point-and-click process. With TimeForge, your staff will communicate better, work more efficiently and eliminate costly mistakes associated with human error.

Additionally, our software makes your business more environmentally-friendly by drastically reducing paper usage, which has been shown to elevate staff morale and improve employee retention rate – employees feel good about being associated with a company that’s environmentally-conscientious.

Sign up for a free trial of our labor management software, and start improving your bottom line today.

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Human Resource Software

We are so excited about our new human resource management product, called TimeForge HR! This software streamlines the application and on-boarding processes, and keeps up with employee certification documents so you don’t have to. Perhaps most importantly, TimeForge HR prevents “The Stack” – that ominous heap of poorly organized applications and certifications that has been sitting in your office for months with only a brief frantic sifting once in a while. With TimeForge HR, all employee certifications and other important documents are compiled online into a single employee folder so you can access them any time, any place … eliminating The Stack!

When it comes to the food service and retail industries, it is imperative that management keep track of the certifications necessary for food handling and serving alcohol. Failing to properly monitor and document relevant employee certifications could lead to costly, reputation-damaging legal repercussions. For example, in many states, if the ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Commission) catches an employee with an expired certification serving alcohol, the location could be shut down, and the employee and manager at fault can be fined or even jailed – a heavy cost to the business.

After uploading important documents into TimeForge HR, management can easily track certifications, qualifications, and training performed by staff members with TimeForge’s automatic reminders. When a certification is nearing expiration, management will receive notifications informing them that necessary certifications or training are nearing expiration and need to be renewed.

TimeForge HR allows managers to create documentation requirements specific to each position (or for each staff member) and when combined with our other products (such as TimeForge Scheduling or TimeForge Attendance), TimeForge HR will prevent unqualified staff members from being scheduled or clocking in without the necessary documentation being submitted to TimeForge (and management) first.

Sign up for a free trial of TimeForge today and let us handle your stack of paperwork, so you don’t have to!

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Reduce Turnover

The number one reason managers quit a restaurant job is because of frustration associated with scheduling. After dealing with all the employee requests and working around personal schedules, managers invest large amounts of time and effort into a schedule which inevitably fails to make everyone happy. Some managers employ a “if the schedule doesn’t work for you, too bad” attitude to reduce their frustrations. This definitely reduces a manager’s stress, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this directly increases turnover rates, which cost your business money. Whether managers are accommodating to employees or not, the frustration of scheduling reduces managerial job satisfaction, ultimately resonating through the ranks to all employees.

According to retensa, 94% of turnover is preventable, so money spent proactively on employee training, staff morale, career development, and staff-management communication can have significant return on investment by resulting in reduced turnover. TimeForge reduces the time and cost associated with accomplishing these vital employee hiring and retention tasks. TimeForge makes building schedules, tracking attendance, exporting and approving payroll and most other management duties fast and simple, which makes managers and staff happy!

Instead of dealing with inefficient and cumbersome Excel spreadsheets and paper logs, managers who use TimeForge are less inclined to feel negatively about scheduling. TimeForge saves management hours and eliminates errors. TimeForge handles HR duties, including document and certification storage, schedule construction, and most labor management tasks.

With TimeForge, your staff will communicate better, work more efficiently, and eliminate costly mistakes associated with human error. Additionally, TimeForge helps make your business more green by drastically reducing paper usage.  Being a green business has been shown to elevate staff morale and improve employee retention rate – staff members (especially Gen Y employees) feel good about being associated with a company that’s environmentally conscious.

Click here to sign up for a free trial of TimeForge and start improving your bottom line today.

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NRA Show 2010

The TimeForge crew travelled to Chicago to attend the 91st National Restaurant Association trade show, which offered more exhibits and information than we could have possibly hoped to absorb during our four day trip. Every year, Chicago hosts over 75,000 food professionals who gather to share and learn about trends and innovations in the service industries. We went to spread the word about our employee scheduling software, tell people how much time and money it can save them, learn about cool new things that affect restaurants, and well – mostly we went to eat! With revolutionary new marketing practices, award-winning equipment, exciting advances in “Green” technologies, and tables overflowing with culinary delights, the 2010 NRA show continued its annual tradition of overwhelming our taste buds and tickling our gadget-crazed fancies.

This show had an eight and a half percent increase in the number of exhibitors compared to last year, so 2010′s show was even more packed with information than usual. The sharing of information did not fall on deaf ears, as there was also a more than eleven percent increase in the number of attendees – which came from over 120 countries!

Perhaps most importantly, the food was awesome! One of our favorite products that was introduced at this year’s show is Chipstix, which are potato chips on a stick… a simple, yet truly revolutionary concept! We hope the chipstix trend spreads like wildfire! The Chork, a disposable chopstick-fork hybrid, is another of our favorite new products! A fork on one end and chopsticks on the other, the Chork looks like it could actually prevent chopstick-challenged folks from looking silly while eating Asian fare.  Our technology itch was scratched by the YWaiter iPhone application, a mobile app which acts as your waiter at participating restaurants. With YWaiter, customers can place drink orders and check out at their own convenience! If this trend catches on, it could revolutionize the entire service industry!

Perhaps our favorite part at this year’s show was the very spontaneous NRA flash mob dance, which really exemplified the humor and camaraderie found in few other industries. Overall, we were entirely pleased with our trip to Chicago and look forward to next year’s show! We hope to see you at the 2011 NRA show!

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