Tech tricks that help your biz run smoothly,
Concierge services, mobile apps take the fuss out of packing for trips, doing paperwork and much more
Being a business owner seems so glamorous — until you do it.
For years, Katie Bush, owner of Louisville-based branding and marketing firm KBD, would fly to the Silicon Valley area every other week to meet with her tech sector-based clients — and grew weary of packing the same clothes for each trip.
And don’t even mention going through the same old tiresome check-in process at the airport.
But last year, she came across DUFL, a concierge service which acts as a virtual wardrobe for professionals. The service allows travelers to store a set of business clothing in DUFL’s warehouse — suits, belts, shoes — and when it’s time to fly, the customer just selects their desired items and travel dates so that DUFL can ship everything to the destination.
“I’m literally just grabbing my briefcase to go on a cross-country trip,” Bush says of the service, which costs $99 for a standard U.S. trip.
After the trip, DUFL retrieves the luggage and sends it back to the warehouse — complete with dry-cleaning.
The stress of being an entrepreneur, running a small business or birthing a start-up is plentiful — there are people to manage, numerous types of paperwork to track and fill out and the headaches that can come with lastminute travel for meetings and conferences.
To make life a bit easier, entrepreneurs and their executives frequently turn to services they can incorporate into their daily processes and work-life balance, sometimes resulting in unexpected improvements.
FILL A JOB IN JUST A FEW TAPS
Saving time is also what Eny Lai, director of human resources at San Francisco-based restaurant chain China Live, loves about-Proven, a mobile app that lets small businesses posts job openings to more than 100 job boards — including Monster, Indeed and Zip Recruiter — with a single submission.
Proven, which is ideal for businesses looking for seasonal workers, lets Lai leave comments on job candidates in the app and then grant viewing permissions to her general managers and chefs. (No meetings required.)
“It makes recruiting so much easier,” Lai says. Users can blast one job for $60; five for $50 per job and 10 jobs for $40 per job.
WHAT PAPERWORK?
Signing up with these services sometimes come with a “surprise” benefit. Dan Spurgeon, service operations manager at Columbus, Ohio-based Bruner Corp., was looking for a way to eliminate piles of paperwork for his 300-person construction company and found Canvas. The app lets businesses create minimobile apps to collect data for forms such as invoices and work orders.
But soon after his crew started taking their Canvas-equipped iPads out to service sites, Spurgeon noticed they started completing a safety survey form, which is required for each job, at a higher rate. That’s a good thing because doing so can reduce the likelihood of injuries by documenting hazards and communicating what kinds of protective gear workers should have, such as goggles or hearing protection.
“It wasn’t getting filled out on a consistent basis before,” Spurgeon says. “It was just one more form for them to fill out. Now it’s much faster for them to click a couple of buttons as opposed to filling it all out by hand.”
Before using Canvas, Spurgeon says Bruner would get the safety forms back 10% of the time. Now it’s more like 80%, he says.
ALL-IN-ONE HR
Similarly, what Aaron Walker appreciates most about Gusto, an all-in-one human resources application that enables employers to handle things such as payroll, benefits and time tracking from a single dashboard, isn’t the reason he initially signed up.
When he started Camelback Ventures — a New Orleans-based organization that provides coaching, financial capital and networking services to entrepreneurs whose businesses also aim to solve social or environmental issues — he was simply looking for a reliable and affordable payroll service.
He later noticed employees were taking advantage of a feature that let them allocate a portion of their paycheck to be donated regularly to charities of their choice. Then there was the time he had to switch from quarterly tax filings to annual filings — a logistical nightmare that Walker says Gusto helped him navigate.