tristianikmorou's Journal

Business Tip - Use An Answering Service To Be More Productive
Small business owners, this really is something you probably don't know - answering services may be a tremendous cost cutters. It can be very scary as a start up to sign on for any additional monthly fees when the money is tight. I know that you want to save money wherever you can at this early point in your business because you want to make as much money as you can. Saved pennies don't always turn into dollars though, especially if you lose a quarter to find the penny.

Time is money is a popular saying for a reason, and it is even true for you as a small business owner. You will come to find that time is your most valuable commodity as a business owner. I have made the mistake of spending too much time to save too little money. Because you can always make more money, but you can never make any more time even if you use the best answering service in Los Angeles.

Let's use my experience as a business owner as an example. The phone was a huge distraction for me because I felt like I had to answer it. I would get excited every time I got a phone call, hoping that it was a new client. It usually was not, but I felt like I had to answer the phone just in case. And answering the phone meant that I had to quit working on a project each time the phone rang.

It is amazing how little you get done without a long stretch of time to work on the big projects. I realized that I needed more blocks of time where I could work interrupted in order to get all of the work on my desk complete each day. It was crazy, I couldn't get things done, and most of the time it was a pointless phone call.

The hard part was I knew that I needed more customers if I was going to make my business work. And I knew that clients were not going to go with me if they got my voice mail. I knew that for the most part, customers would call someone else who answered the phone rather than wait for me to call them back. But, I also knew that as I was going, I couldn't handle more customers without hiring staff which I definetely couldn't afford. Even if I hired someone on part time, it would have used up much of my profits and I would have had to spend a bunch of time training the new staff.

Unfortunately, I felt like I had to work longer hours to try to keep up with everything that I had to do. I had started my business to get away from the crazy hours that I had to work in my previous job, but now I was working even longer hours. Something had to give. I had to find a way to be more productive, or I was going to have to shut down the business that I had worked so hard to start.

Luckily, I finally wised up and looked into an answering service. I had put it off because I didn't think that I could afford it, but I found one that offered great service at a price that I could afford. It was like having a few extra hands around, because I was able to get so much more done in much less time! I realized through this that my time was worth money, and that I could make more money with the added expense of an answering service.

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