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Growing Pains -
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You have grown your business to the point that the travel time to service your customers is affecting your company's productivity, or you want to expand into a new county or state. You know how to find the right location that is near major roads, has good utilities (phone and electrical service), but how do you expand the office activities without losing control, or running at a loss until the operation comes up to speed?
This is a big job for a company -- it is as difficult as hiring and training your first employee. There is no trick to success in this venture, except vigilance and hard work. However, there are some guidelines and tools you can use to help minimize problems.
The first is to establish good communications between the remote location and your main office. Land-line phone, backup cell service and high-speed internet access is a minimum to get started. If you want, you can have the phone service put the remote phone on your hunt group and, if all your phones are busy in the office, the phone will ring in the remote office.
Computer access can be implemented by using Window XP-Pro and Remote Desktop Connection to give access from the remote site to your main office. This works great, is cheap and supports printing at both the main office and the remote location. You can find this installed on your system in \Programs\Accessories\Communications\Remote Desktop Connection .This is the part you run at the remote site. The host site is turned on in the Control Panel using the System icon, select Remote tab. If you are a using a router, the magic port number is 3389 (this is the default).
Pay attention – the objective is to make sure that each employee at the remote location knows that you are interested in the operations and want to make it a success. Some simple things to do are
1) Have the person at the location take digital photos of inside of cab and outside of vehicle, and store the images in a dated directory at the main office. You can view the images, by changing the view on the directory to view thumbnails and when you open the directory you see the picture of the vehicle.
2) Have each truck cleaned at least once a week -- a steam cleaner and 2 hours OT should take care of the labor. The point you are making is that the vehicles are important to you and you are concerned. You will be pleasantly surprised on your reduced maintenance costs.
3) Track and report daily production activity. This can be as simple as recording miles, units serviced, sites serviced, hours, and downtime on a single line per driver, and this should be posted with running averages at least once a week. It is best if you can track actual productivity numbers for your business. Cans, if commercial waste, units serviced, gallons pumped, boxes delivered and, of course, problems like downtime hours, missed services, etc.
You can staff the location with a part-time clerk for A.M. hours or a lead driver, to handle day-to-day administration, but when you or your site coordinator arrives, make sure you bring good news, clean truck award, safety award, production award, increased sales award, etc., as you want your visits to be associated with good news. Otherwise, you will never hear about the problems. If you want to try an experiment, go home and only say nice things to your significant other or kids and then touch them on the shoulder. After a week, stop and they will ask you what is wrong. It is the same with remote locations. The majority of your employees want to make your company a success; you need to communicate what the success means!
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