Our customers come in a beautiful array of shapes and sizes, owner manager businesses running a few jobs per month through to larger staffing business running many hundreds of shifts per day. Some have growing pains, some have ‘grown’ pains, all have opportunities to improve efficiency, productivity and profitability.
A regular topic of conversation is how to best leverage the new technology opportunities that are available as a result of the shift towards low cost, monthly subscription software that deliver ingenious solutions to very specific challenges in a business.
Everything from email through to CRM, staff management, marketing, project management and accounts can now be delivered better than ever before, cheaper than ever before.
Here’s a list of the software that we believe forms the basic platform for building out a highly efficient, profitable staffing business:
Email, Calendar, Files – At only £3 per user per month, Google for business comes with your own custom email address, Google Drive for storing all of your files, 99.9% uptime and the ability to access it anywhere. No need for an expensive email client, hosting or IT support.
Sales – Successful sales is about structured process. Measuring your ‘activity’, the metrics that deliver a sale (phone calls, emails, meetings, conversions), is fundamental in building up your sales pipeline and growing your revenue. To do this, you need a decent CRM. We recommend HighriseHQ, built by a brilliant company called 37Signals. Highrise offers a completely free version for 2 users and a basic entry level at £16 per month.
Project Management – The cost of retaining an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one. You can grow a great staffing agency by over delivering to your existing customer base, retaining them year in, year out, and growing with them. You over deliver by being super hot at managing your staffing projects. We recommend both Asana and Trello as two very cool products that are free!
Staff Management – Staffing is a labour intensive industry, the management of people and their ever evolving diaries and needs, a complex juggling act. If run inefficiently, staffing businesses turn into small crisis management centres, managers running from one little fire to another. The job is harder when you’re not using the optimal set up. If you’re using separate email, Excel documents, payroll solutions, power point for profiles, mobiles for sending SMS, staffing is stressful.
Optimise your staff management with Watu. Integrated recruitment, job scheduling and booking, messaging, automated profile creation, online expenses, 30 second payroll makes the job WAY easier, saves you HUGE amounts of time and frees you up to get out there and grow your business. All for the price of a London cup of coffee per day. Pricing.
Accounting – Good friends of ours and only around the corner in London Bridge, Kashflow build super easy to use accounting software for SMEs at the beautiful cost of £18 per month.
Staffing doesn’t need to be super stressful. The stress can be managed. We know this having seen the dramatic time saving Watu has achieved for our customers (watch testimonial), and read the resultant smiles (read testimonial). Structure your staffing business for success, work with the right tools to give yourself the best opportunity to grow and then get out there and do what you’re great at, recruiting brilliant people to deliver for your clients.
Interested in playing with Watu? Register for your free trial here.