December 2006
The Business Of Workplace
Wellness
Late Payment Can Really Cost
You
Your Website Can Be A
Goldmine For Getting Leads
Reduce Your Printing Costs
 
The Business Of Workplace Wellness
Want to reduce the number of days lost to illness
among your employees? The best way to do this is
to create a healthy group of employees. People
in good health are happier and more productive,
so there’s every reason to take the initiative
in making your workforce a healthy one.
You won’t be alone. A recent survey by Inc. magazine
found that 51% of small- to medium-sized
businesses encourage employees to exercise or
participate in a company wellness program of
some sort. These range across offerings such as
encouraging healthy eating, keep fit classes,
smoking cessation, workplace safety training,
designing ergonomic workspaces, teaching first
aid and C.P.R., offering coaching and
counseling, running lunch and learns, and
providing on-site healthcare.
For over a decade research has been showing the
effectiveness of employee wellness programs.
Returns in cost savings have consistently been
greater than the amount invested in running the
program as measured through decreased
absenteeism, fewer sick days, reduced claims,
lowered health and insurance costs, and
improvements to employee performance and
productivity.
Your program can be customized to suit the types of
work done in your business as well as to the
hours people work. The program can be based
solely on the workplace, or ideally as a
combination of healthy practices at work and at
home. The aim is to meet the needs of both the
organization and its people so both are
healthier as a result.
To get started there are some excellent resources
available for free and some simple programs that
are easily initiated:
• You can source well produced health education materials from
not-for-profit health agencies
• Incorporate a five minute stretching session into every
meeting that lasts more than one hour
• Encourage employees and their family members to have regular
physical and dental check ups
• Provide nutritional information on how to read food labels.
Look for free booklets from not-for-profit
health based associations or government bodies
• Arrange lunchtime seminars on health topics such as stress
management, good nutrition and back care
There are also many low cost initiatives you can
implement to achieve even greater success with
your program:
• Introduce a ‘smoke free’ work environment and offer
counseling to those smokers finding it difficult
to give up the habit
• Replace coffee and tea with fresh fruit juices in meetings
• Provide fruit in the lunchroom instead of cookies and cakes
• Provide flu shots or time off to get one
• Provide all employees with a free blood pressure check
• Put scales and weight charts in the restrooms
• For birthday celebrations in the office provide healthy
snack food instead of sugar rich cakes
• Arrange an hour’s Q&A session with a qualified nutrition
expert
• Arrange a visit from a fitness specialist who can create
home-based exercise programs for individual
employees
Workplace health promotion will enable your team
members to gain the added support of their
colleagues in sticking with health improving
activities. It can be simple and easy to
implement, and delivers the benefits of greater
productivity along with a reduction in the
considerable costs associated with employee ill
health.
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Late Payment Can Really Cost You
Many companies are carrying customer accounts that are
still outstanding after 60 or even 90 days.
Sometimes this is acceptable if that’s the
arrangement they’ve made with the customer and
planned for in their budgeting. But when an
outstanding account gets beyond reason you may
have to bring in external agents to help collect
the debt.
Debt collection experts have identified four
‘triggers’, apart from lateness, that are
definite indicators that the time has come to
call in the professionals:
1.
More than one broken promise of payment.
2.
More than one lie about payment having been
made.
3.
A check that’s bounced more than once.
4.
A change of address with no forwarding notice.
It’s reasonable to give a debtor one chance to pay up.
If they repeat a broken promise, a lie or a bad
check, they’ve had their chance. And if they
move without telling you, they’re probably
hiding from you and other creditors. Your best
hope of getting paid in these circumstances is
to use the services of a professional collection
agency.
Working with a collection
agency
To do their work, collection agencies need documented
information from you that will enable them to
recover the debt, or as much of it as possible:
1. Accurate records of the transaction and when the debt was
incurred. This could be a purchase order or a
letter requesting supply, together with your
paperwork that proves the goods or services were
provided.
2. Copies of the original invoice, plus all the statements
you’ve sent that refer to this invoice. If you
have proof of sending them, such as a post
office receipt, this will help prove that you
have gone through the normal processes of
requesting payment.
3. Any correspondence between you and the customer regarding
the debt. This can include letters, emails,
faxes and even notes from telephone
conversations you’ve had with them.
4. Records of past transactions with the
customer that show what they’ve previously
purchased and how and when they’ve paid for
their purchases.
Prevention is better than
collection
It’s not just that outstanding accounts are costing
you money in lost interest and other carrying
charges. The process of actually chasing late
payments and dealing with bad debt itself is
estimated to be costing the SME sector huge
amounts each year.
Yet, despite rising cash flow pressure on SMEs, most
are still failing to adequately protect
themselves from bad debt. Many have no
provisions at all in place for an unexpected
increase in bad debts and are thrown back on
using their bank overdraft facility or covering
cash flow shortfalls from their personal
savings.
The reality is that chasing payment and dealing with
bad debt is a fact of business life and that
what you need is a strategy to minimize the
extent and impact of having to do it. It should
start when you first deal with a customer. All
new customers should complete a credit
application that includes their company name,
the names of directors, how long they’ve been
trading, their address and other contact
details, as well as a minimum of three referees
with whom they’ve established credit.
At the time the application is taken, the customer
should be given a written summary of your credit
terms that state a credit limit, a term for
payment of any outstanding amounts, and the
interest rate you’ll charge on debts that exceed
your credit terms. If you don’t already have a
written summary of your credit terms, this is a
good time to create one.
Summarize your credit policy on every invoice and
statement, and note that any errors or other
issues that relate to a dispute over amounts
must be raised with your company within two
weeks of the date of the statement.
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Your Website Can Be A Goldmine For Getting
Leads
Every business with a website should be using it as a
source of leads – high quality, qualified leads
from people who want to know more about what you
sell. Visitors to your site are already
interested in your company - now it’s up to you
to get the information you need from them and
turn it into a sale.
Your website can be easily structured to provide you
with hundreds of leads each week. Here are five
ways you can turn it into a lead generating
powerhouse.
Offer
something that will encourage visitors to
provide contact details
Prepare something interesting that relates to each
product or group of products that visitors can
download. It might be a guide about how to use a
product to solve a particular problem, or
perhaps some useful DIY instructions. All they
have to give you is their email address and they
get something for nothing. Place your offer in a
prominent position on your home page and make it
easy to access. You’ll know by what they
download just which product or products have
attracted their interest.
Offer free
advice about specific problems
Invite people to contact you through the site with
help requests relating to the jobs they will be
doing using your products. Make this a separate
but equally prominent offer to any guide or
other download, for example by offering an email
link. Suggest a few common queries to make it
easy for them to complete, but allow plenty of
space for them to write out their own inquiry if
it’s not on your list. Tell them your "expert"
advisor will respond within 24 hours and be sure
you actually do this because there’s nothing
worse than a broken promise of assistance.
Use an
autoresponder for inquiries
Regardless of what visitors download you can set up an
autoresponder to send them back an initial
message thanking them for their interest and
requesting more information about them. The
autoresponder can send either a general message
or something related to the material they’ve
just downloaded. You’ll have to give them
something else as a "reward" for providing this
information; it could be a free product sample,
a newsletter, or something else that will show
your appreciation. The most important thing is
that your response gets to them while they’re
still thinking about your company’s products.
Ask for
feedback about the website
As a general rule, people will go from the home page
directly to the part of your site in which they
have the most interest. Ease of navigation is
important so be sure to make their options clear
when they first get to your site. Then, after
they’ve selected a particular product page and
before they can leave the site, have a window
pop up asking them for feedback. A typical
feedback request may be… "Were we able to
solve your problem with this information? Please
tell us what you think about our site". This
will then take them to a feedback form from
which you can collect more information about
them. You’ll increase the number of completed
forms if you offer a free gift or some other
small token of appreciation. Be sure to thank
them for completing the form after they’ve sent
it in.
Ask visitors
to participate in a survey
Most people like to give you their opinion. A survey
invitation can go in several places such as on
your home page, in your autoresponder email, and
in a follow-up newsletter or other
communication. The survey should be brief and
easy to complete, but the answers will indicate
their interests in much greater detail. Ask them
if they’ve tried any of your products or used
any of the ideas in your materials; ask for any
suggestions they’d like to make that might
enable your company to be even more helpful to
site visitors. A good offer to encourage people
to complete the survey is a contest - "Give
us your opinions and win a prize" - with the
prize being something that is related to your
product range.
Each of these ways of gathering information provides
you with a qualified lead. At a minimum you’ll
get a prospect’s email address and an idea of
what they’re interested in. By incorporating all
of these techniques into your website you’ll
have turned it into a valuable lead-generating
tool that captures information you’d never have
acquired from other sources.
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Reduce Your Printing Costs
Getting printing done can be a time consuming
business, as well as always seeming to be more
expensive than you’d expect. But with a bit of
planning and attention to detail you can make it
a much less frustrating task. Here are some
ways to keep the costs of printing down while
maintaining good standards of quality.
Discuss the
job with your printer
Nobody knows better than a printer about how to reduce
the costs of printing. It can be done by using
less expensive paper, a less complex graphics
style, or perhaps by subcontracting certain jobs
out to a smaller, specialist operator. If your
printer is concerned about losing your business
over a pricing issue, they’ll usually find a way
to meet your needs at a better price.
Watch the way
your artwork is prepared
You may not need a fancy four-color printing job,
depending on how the materials have been
designed. Talk this over with your graphics
supplier and see if a two-color print run would
be adequate for the type of job you’re
creating. Another point to consider is that
making changes after the artwork leaves the
graphics firm is expensive and likely to cause
delays in delivery of the final job. It’s your
responsibility to see that everything is
correct, including the spelling and the
illustrations, so make sure to check the artwork
carefully before accepting it.
Use a printing
press matched to job requirements
There are many different kinds of printing presses.
Some printers only have the four-color variety,
and they naturally cost more to operate than a
simple two-color machine. If you only need a
one-color letterhead, you can save money by
going to a printer with a one-color press. The
reverse situation applies when a small printer
tries to do a high quality four-color job. Be
sure your work is matched to the printer’s
capabilities.
Insist on good
quality
Most printers are capable of turning out a good
quality of finished product so if the job’s not
as good as you expected, talk to the printer
about having it reprinted and keep an eye on the
quality as the job goes through. When you’re
initially placing the job, ensure you
specifically mention the level of quality you
require. Get proofs for every printing job
before giving the final "okay", and sign the
proof when you return it to the printer so
there’s no doubt about what you’ve approved.
Keep a samples
file
Keep samples of printing that you like. If you want a
particular type of paper or special color
combination, then using a printed example is the
best way to show a printer or a graphic designer
exactly what you mean. Just saying "glossy" or
"bright" isn’t sufficiently meaningful to a
person in the printing or graphics trades.
Meet your
personal deadlines
Print jobs are often rushed and important deadlines
can be missed due to a number of factors. The
first thing to appreciate is that the more time
you give a printer, the more likely it is that
the job will be finished on time and with the
quality you want.
If you have a deadline, be sure the printer knows
about it. They can take you through all the
steps and tell you whether it’s possible to meet
it. Do all you can to speed up the process by
ensuring proofs are returned promptly. And
always keep in mind that making changes at the
proofing stage is almost a guaranteed way of
having the job come in late.
By following these guidelines you can save money on
your printing and get a better job done as well.
Buying printing doesn’t have to be time
consuming or needlessly expensive; just plan
ahead and know that you too have
responsibilities that must be met to ensure the
process runs smoothly.
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