Blog | HireEzy - Hire and Rental Software

19 Feb

Rental or Hire Equipment Safety Instructions

It goes with out saying these days that ensuring your customers operate the equipment they rent or hire from your company is a business critical issue.

Not just because it is morally and ethically the right thing to do, but also to ensure you are not subject to legal actions.

Customer safety is now a business critical issue

Hire and Rental companies regularly provide a range of equipment that requires some form of safety instruction.

There are a number of issues that hire and rental companies need to consider in their approach to OHS, not only to their customers but also their off site staff.

Such issues include:

Ensuring that safety instructions accompany each hire or rental and have an audit trail to demonstrate it;

Increasing the means by which customers can access hire or rental equipment safety data;

Ensuring off site staff, such as delivery drivers, assemblers, collectors and even inspectors have client site safety data briefs; and

Even the adhoc or routine scheduling of client site safety or maintenance inspections.

Addressing these issues is good business practise, part of mitigating your business risks. Such business practise is a combination of good staff training and awareness, good processes and a good hire or rental software system.

Safety Instructions issued to Clients.

HireEzy enables safety instructions to become an automated part of the picking and delivery process. Adding in a client signature for issued items, including the safety instructions aids in providing a demonstrable proof that such instructions were issued and received. A copy of the signed receipt that can then be attached to the client booking and hence client record, to maintain an historical record.

Increasing Means of Access.

Not all clients like reading safety instructions, particularly complex ones. Have you considered using demonstration videos? If so what about uploading such a video to YouTube or your own web site. If that sounds hard or you want to link such a process to your hire or rental management, then simply consider using HireEzy.

Off Site Safety Instructions.

Many client sites require some form of on-site safety compliance, particularly construction sites. To simplify the process of managing off site safety, simply link the client safety instructions to the booking and hence to the contractors or staff that are going to site. This requires in-built document management and workflow, which HireEzy has.

Client Site Safety or Maintenance Checks.

Such visits not only need to be scheduled they need to be set in the task list. Because HireEzy includes a task management system, these checks can be scheduled, often months in advance. This means that when planning for the week ahead, you can see not only your hire or rental related activities, you can also see any client site checks that need to be undertaken.

HireEzy certainly makes a big difference in improving your Hire and Rental Safety OHS management. However it must be supported by good staff training and staff compliance to processes.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

Work Based Learning & Health and Safety Act 1974 (slideshare.net)
Families told doormats are health and safety risk (telegraph.co.uk)
Father told he needs £350 insurance for son to do work experience at home (telegraph.co.uk)

19 Feb

American Event and Event Rental Industry Fights Back!

In a recent post , we discussed how the downturn in the American economy was leading to a substantive downturn in the $175 Billion corporate meetings market.

Driven by companies slashing their conference, event and major meetings budget. Such budgets incur not only event equipment rental and event hire costs, but also travel, accommodation/venue costs.

Surveys indicate that over 60% of all companies intend to reduce their spending on meetings next year. See earlier post in this blog – titled Why tough times should benefit the hire and rental industry

One factor that is concerning is why! Many companies recognize the importance of holding client and staff events and meetings. However in the current climate, many shareholders and Government Agencies providing stimulus funds perceive such events and meetings as lavish junkets. Companies and Corporations are “sheepish” about defending the business value, hence opt to cancel them.

Now a coalition of event and meet industry- including event rental and event hire companies, as well as planners and organizers are fighting back. They have formed a coalition to lobby the USA Government about the benefits of events and meetings to the USA economy and USA Corporate Health.

The “Keep America Meeting“ campaign provides on line information about the business value of the industry. Furthermore it includes an online petition to be presented to politicians.

This initiative of the event industry is welcomed, and should be seen as a role model for other event and meeting industries is similarly effected countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK.

Making Life Ezy suppliers of the most innovative event and party rental software welcome the coalitions initiative.

About Us

19 Feb

Resources for Hire and Rental Entrepreneurs

Hire and Rental can be an extremely profitable and high growth business.

Examples abound of incredibly successful entrepreneurs in the industry who have grown their businesses to impressive levels. Continued growth in the sector is a given. Particularly with the growth of niche based rental or hire companies, such as Baby Equipment, Handbags, Cocktail machines, the list goes on.

To support Industry growth we have started this list of tools and sites that entreprenuers can use. We will add to it over time to provide a single resource to support the industry’s entrepreneurs.

If you have any resource sites you think useful then please let us know so we can add them.

12 Do’s and Don’t For Entrepreneurs

Top 10 Social NetWorks for Enterpreneurs

Entrepreneur Resource Centre

MIT Sloan Management

Entrepreneurship – Kauffman Foundation

Invest to Exit – Dr Tom McKaskill

Fact versus Fiction: What makes a good entrepreneur

Does failure mean you have failed?

A Dozen Don’ts for Entrepreneurs

About Us

Baby Boomers are Today’s Entrepreneurs (boomercafe.com)
Anatomy of an Entrepreneur (yogeshnaiks-blawg.blogspot.com)
Which augmented reality startups are most ready to dominate the market? We rank them. (digital.venturebeat.com)
The entrepreneur whiz kid myth (money.cnn.com)
The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur (myventurepad.com)

19 Feb

Series One SEO for Rental Hire Companies

This is the first in a series of articles designed to help your hire company or rental company improve your website rankings.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the termed used to generically describe those things you can do to improve your search engine ranking.

That is how high you appear in the search results of a search engine, ie Google, Yahoo or Bing, when your potential customers type in the keywords that best describe your hire or rental business.

For example, if a customer seeking a party rental or party hire company in their area, types in “party rental miami” then in an ideal world you are the first company to appear in the search engine results.

Achieving that result though requires that you use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques.

Search Engine Optimization. This term is widely used in the search engine industry as a collective name for those activities that are directly or indirectly aimed at improving a page’s search engine ranking.

Yes you can pay someone to do it!

Or You can do the SEO yourself!

This series of articles will help you to get started doing it yourself.

The first thing to do is getting a basic understanding or how Search Engines work and then also of SEO

First How Search Engines Work

The first thing to do is to understand the search engine optimisation and to do that you need to understand the basics of how search engines work.
Although an older article, I like it because it keeps things pretty simple enabling you to get a basic understanding which can be built on later.

Second A Basic Introduction to Understanding SEO

There are a number of papers around which introduce your to SEO.

On our EzySoft YouTube channel we have some great introductory video’s to SEO, the best being Search Engine Optimization, click here

Or if you prefer to read, start with, a basic introduction to SEO. Or alternatively this one is equally short and sweet, introduction to SEO.

Next Article – Getting Started

The next article gets you started with your [intlink id="1770" type="post"]DIY SEO[/intlink]

About Us

SEO Mistakes to Avoid (suescaletta.com)
SEO tactics (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)
How Search Engine Optimisation Does The Job (ronmedlin.com)

19 Feb

Hire Software & Rental Software for Mac and Windows

HireEzy is believed to be the World’s only true full function business management software system for Rental and Hire Companies using MAC computers providing the full functional business requirements needed to provide all rental and hire management needs

HireEzy is a full business management hire software and rental software for Mac and Windows operating systems.

Our Software provides Apple Macintosh business users as well as Windows operating system business users with not just a fully functional standard hire and rental management software program.

It offers far more with inbuilt POS and accounting, and the tools to BUILD YOUR BUSINESS, including

* A Web-online Store;
* Web Content Management
* Digital Marketing Tools
* Social Media Integration Tools
* Inbuilt Mass SMS and Email.

Expect more from your hire software and rental software business management systems regardless of whether you use Apple Mac or Windows.

Replace your hire and rental management package, web site building, web content management, accounting, marketing systems and more with just one Fully Integrated Easy to Use business management software for your rental or hire business.

For more details contact us.

We believe that Hire Software should not just help manage your business it should help grow it AND HireEzy does

19 Feb

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 8 Nov

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week.

I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

This week in Thumbs Up I found a couple of fantastic little handy apps and some surprising news about the uptake of Windows 7. Check it out below:

Why couldn’t someone release this years ago – XP Quick Fix Plus Repairs Common Windows XP Errors http://bit.ly/38Hhtd

Well… I don’t think I need to remind anyone that XP has had its fair share of problems. This program launches into an interface which details 40 of the biggest problems in XP whilst providing an interface to click a button to plug that problem. Unbelievably amazing app. I would recommend you grab this app and run it on your XP installation and I would also recommend that Microsoft hunt down the developer of this software, write them a blank check to buy the whole company and submit this software over Windows Update.

This is pretty handy – Cache My Work Restores Your Workspace After a Restart [Downloads] http://bit.ly/2Ffdyv

I have this happen to me all the time – I get into work in the morning and Windows rebooted through the night to install automatic updates, therefore everything that was open on my desktop had been automatically closed. Trust me, this freaks me out everytime it happens as I usually have about 10 – 15 scripts open on my desktop at any one time that I am working on and it’s annoying to have to retrace my steps and figure out what I was working on at the end of the day yesterday instead of just having it all there still open like it is supposed to be. This application attempts to address this issue by keeping a log of everything that is open on the desktop – if you have to suddenly reboot, this program will reopen all of your applications for you when Windows starts up and in some cases can even reopen the files you were working with inside your applications. It’s not perfect, but it’s heaps better than nothing. I installed this and I love it.

This is a great tip – Adding Flip 3D to Windows 7′s Taskbar http://tinyurl.com/ybb85pn #Channel10

So, if you follow the instuctions here you can essentially make a little tool that replicates the Windows Key + TAB functionality, but I tell you what – despite the Windows Key being on 104 keyboards ever since the release of Windows 95, there are an alarmingly frustrating amount of people out there that have absolutely no idea what the Windows Key is. So, when a core piece of functionality for cycling through windows open on your desktop involves telling people to “use the Windows key”, it is extremely easier to just set this icon up on their task bar. Trust me, it is. And you know what? I actually like it – once launched, you can just hit the TAB key to cycle between windows, instead of having to keep holding the Windows key whilst tabbing to keep the Flip 3D feature open. Check out the article this is worth doing for your Windows 7 machine.

Interesting statistics – Windows 7 Market Share Climbing Fast http://tinyurl.com/ydlm8mt #Channel10

So much for Apple‘s new ads saying that everyone was excited around the Windows 7 launch because it was time to upgrade to a Mac. All it took was for Windows 7 to be on the market for two weeks, and already the global marketshare for Windows 7 machines across the world is bigger than Mac OSX Snow Leopard, which has been on the market for three months. As of the time of writing, 3.27% of all computers in the WORLD have Windows 7 on it. Pretty amazing statistic. Another under the radar piece of info in this article is the fact that the global marketshare for Windows overall was almost 93%, which is a lot better than it used to be earlier in the year when I heard that it had dropped just under 90%. It seems that there aren’t as many Macs in the world as everyone thought there was – Apple still have their work cut out for them, no wonder they are spending half a billion dollars are year on advertising.

Geek alert! – Coke Zero Has Zero Calories And Sugar, But Is High In Spy Cameras http://bit.ly/2uIK8h

You’ve gotta love spy cams built into everyday objects – they are mega handy. This artcle demonstrates a Coke can with a camera inside and a USC cable attached so you can use it as an instant web cam for spying on your house / office whilst you are not there. Interested? Me too. Check out the link.

About Us

Windows 7 already bigger than Snow Leopard and Linux combined (downloadsquad.com)
Windows 7: like Vista, but good (guardian.co.uk)
Mossberg on Windows 7 vs OS X – “A Toss Up” (jkontherun.com)
Prepare for the desktop update onslaught with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 (ztrek.blogspot.com)

click here
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19 Feb

How to Use Alexa to Improve Your Search Rankings

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Alexa provides the generally accepted global rankings for websites.

Whether it is accurate or not, the point is mute, the fact is that it is the generally accepted web site ranking.

Did You Know

That in July 2008, Google announced that it had just indexed over 1,000,000,000,000 (USA one trillion) unique web pages (url’s). Impressed well you should be because ten years earlier it was only 26 million (which is only 0.0026% of one trillion).

What are Alexa Rankings?

Alexa ranks sites based on the information gathered from Internet users who use the Alexa tool bar on their browser.

OK, yes not every one has Alexa tool bar so the traffic rankings are estimates only. Hence the criticism levelled at Alexa from some quarters.

But then again what’s the difference between these estimates and television ratings, they are only estimates as well
The primary users of the data are advertisers. Trying to determine which show (web site) to advertise on to reach their target market.

But Alexa actually offers more than that!

The Only Advertising on Our Site is Our Own – So Why Bother About Rankings?

Great question!

Yes, you can actually have a very low ranked site, yet be effective in generating traffic your website from good keyword usage. Evidence that you have a good SEO practise in place.

Under Rated Benefits of Alexa

Alexa is a under rated marketing tool:

Enhance Your Credibility. One aspect of the sales process, particularly on-line marketing and sales is proving that you are credible. Basically you can deliver what you say. Customer testimonials on your site as well as other proofs. Having a good Alexa traffic ranking can form part of the credibility proof set. Why because it implies to on-line customers that other people value your site.
Market Research. Alexa is an excellent market research tool to support your competitor and market analysis. In areas like your performance relative to them, keywords, reach etc.
Guide to Social Media Marketing Performance. Ok out on a limb here, but we found that when we were really active on social media marketing our Alexa ranking went North with a bullet!!! So arguments about methodology etc of Alexa aside it was a useful tool we think in measuring our performance.

About Us

Usability and Search Engine Promotion (lazerpromotions.com)
Inbound Marketing: How to use Social Media to Direct the Flow of Online Information and Opinions to Irrigate and Grow Your Brand (unionstreetmedia.com)

19 Feb

Why Small Businesses Should Blog?

Blogs can be a excellent tool for the vast majority of hire and rental businesses.

Specifically party, audio visual and general equipment type hire and rental businesses.

Did you know?

Companies that blog have 55% more visitors

source: hubspot industry survey

Increasingly as other posts have discussed the primary lead source for most successful hire and rental businesses is the web. Hence the marketing objective becomes how to increase web site traffic.

Janet Meiners Thaeler in an excellent article for Small Business Trends shows that companies with blogs generate 55% more web traffic than those who dont. The full article is a must read, on the upside it is also short and easy to understand. Link to the article is below.

Blogging: The Best SEO Tool for Small Businesses

Remember that in HireEzy 2.1 we provide you with desktop integration to your blog, and even help you set one up.

Making it so much easy for you to get started and maintaining your blog.

Not sure how to write a blog article, then read this -[intlink id="1471" type="post"]How to Write a Blog Post [/intlink].

About Us

Using Twitter to Promote your Blog
Great Resources to Improve Your Blog
6 Easy Sources To Find Blog Topics (smallbiztrends.com)
3 Keys to Small Business Marketing Success (marketing.blogtanker.com)
Gaining Blog Subscribers (toprankblog)

19 Feb

How Hire and Rental Companies Can Use You Tube

You tube is a greatly under utilized resource for hire and rental companies.

You Tube can be used for a variety of purposes such as:

Risk Reduction:

Reduce OHS and Public Liability Risk:

Upload safety instruction video’s for clientsand Contractors/ Staff on how to safely use hire equipment. With HireEzy you can include the link to the safety instruction video with the client booking documentation.

Reduce Product Damages:

Assembly and Installation instructional video’s can be uploaded. Often your supplier will have these, so it is simply a case of uploading the video. Incredibly simple with HireEzy, as the instructional video for each specific item can be uploaded to you tube with one click.

Reduce Customer Dissatisfaction:

If a client can not assemble something, then generally they will blame you, before they blame themselves. You need to make it easier to show customers how to erect or use things. Showing through a video is far better than handing them a set of written instructions, it is just a fact of human nature.

Increase Revenue:

Youtube can be a very effective lead generation tool or sales reference site.

Examples

We have created a site on you tube which shows examples of how different companies are using You Tube to address each of these business requirements. Click Here to Go to Our YouTube Channel

Remember HireEzy provides you with a powerful tool to integrate Web2.0 productivity tools like You Tube in to your hire and rental business processes.

About Us

McKinsey and Web 2.0 (arnoldit.com)
UShow.com – Share Videos Using Tags (killerstartups.com)

19 Feb

Creating Low Cost Product Photos for Business

Need for creating high quality product images is increasing!

But the cost to Small Business in time and money can be prohibitive.

Images are needed for:

Web sites
Digital marketing Catalogues
Even for HTML email campaigns
As well as traditional media advertising

Not having images or having low quality images can seriously detract from a Small Businesses Marketing effort. Detraction that in a competitive market can directly impact on sales.

A key cost driver is often the high volume of product images needed

Many small businesses, particularly rental and hire can have hundred’s if not thousands of products. Hence paying to have each product photographed is literally cost prohibitive.

Taking adhoc images or using supplier product photographs can create an inconsistent image appearance.

Images with different sizes, backgrounds, borders, orientations etc when placed on a web site or catalogue can look terrible.

Creating a negative perception in the client’s/ prospects mind.

The issue becomes how to create consistent looking photographs/ images that enhance your brand’s advertising appeal and impact regardless of the advertising medium.

Creating Low Cost Quality Product Photo’s

However there are some very effective ways of creating your own consistent high quality images.

Creating you own in-house photography studio is actually far easier than your think.

In a series of step by step video’s you can see how to create these product photographs.

We have collated these from YouTube and all are accessible on our YouTube channel – how to photograph your own products

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19 Feb

Managing Different Trading Brands

Many Rental and Hire companies offer more than just one product or service.

In many cases they can offer a range of services each of which may be seperately marketed.

A company may in addition to its basic equipment rental or hire offer services such as planning, consultancy, event staff etc. Some even go further and provide complete solutions, a mix of products and services.

Often these can be traded and marketed under one brand, but this is not always the case. For various market reasons companies may elect to trade these services under different brands. For example:

Product Rental or Hire – traded as MLE Equipment Rental or Hire;

Services – eg event planning services traded as Ronji Event Services; or

Solutions – major event management solutions – traded as MEMS

Managing Separate Business Units

Each business unit if marketed separately will need:

•   Trading names;
•   Logo’s;
•   Web addresses;
•   Booking Management;
•   Products or Services offer; and
•   Bank Accounts.

HireEzy – Allows Up to Five Business Units

HireEzy enables you to manage up to five differently marketed services. Each marketed business unit is able to send documentation etc out under its own distinctive brand, with the name, logo etc all included.

Bookings can be made and managed for each marketed business unit.

Inventory whether a product or service can be restricted to one business unit or shared centrally some or all business units.

About Us

19 Feb

Hire and Rental Software with integrated web content management

Hire and Rental companies are increasingly finding that the web is a primary source of new sales inquiries.

In fact over 55% of new hire and rental leads now come from the web

Major Business Issue

The business issue though is ensuring that the virtual (web presence) and the physical (actual shop or store) are aligned! Such that whether a customer “walks in” or “clicks in” that get the same up to date accurate information.

This may sound simple but as most rental and hire companies know it is not!

Why!

Because the data for each item (description, category, images etc) is maintained both in the rental or hire business management system and separately in the web database.

Cost

This imposes a real cost on Rental and Hire companies.

As each time they update their inventory, either adding a new item, or new images, or even new descriptions – they have to pay a web developer to make the changes.

One client stated that this cost was running in to thousands of dollars per annum

A cost imposition just to simply update basic information!

Eliminate the Cost and Take Control

Eliminate this cost, make the change once and have it update the web automatically with one click!

You can with HireEzy 2.1!

Go Beyond!

Why not also update your specials, your promotions etc – in fact why not take control of your web content yourself.

Hire and Rental companies can now manage their web content, including hire items, images, pricing and promotions through the one single application. Even update your own terms and conditions with one click.

On-line Requests Let customers browse, select and place an order request on line – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year!!!!!

You can with HireEzy 2.1 and our web option.

We make the web an integral part of your business as it should be in this day and age.

Read more about the benefits of the integrated SMS and how it can reduce booking cancellations or no shows by 25%. Link to article

HireEzy 2.1 also includes an inbuilt range of web 2.0 productivity tools, Social Media integration and digital marketing tools (such as mass email, SMS, high graphic catalogues etc). All easy to use by YOU!

No wonder HireEzy is the world’s most innovative Hire Software and Rental Software .

About Us

19 Feb

Social media isn’t the problem- its the current crop of managers

The current generation of managers (C Levels) are the barrier to Social Media.

And the problem is not social media that has just brought it to a head

There has been lots of traffic over recent months how junior staff are struggling to convince older managers of the benefits of Social Media.

The are stuggle has to come to a head because of Social Media

The C Level Managers today were junior staff in the 1980′s. A time when the whole western world got so wrapped up in down-sizing, right sizing – productivity improvements.

They think, and I should know I went through it too, all about lean and mean – minimum staff to do a job – its all about the productivity per person. To most of them Social Media is idle chatter in fact all chatter is idle.

All Customer Conversations are Idle Chatter

To the C Level Managers today whose careers started in the late 1970′s and 1980′s – any customer conversation is idle chatter. Think about it, have you heard things like this.

Telephone Calls: You spent too long on the customer account call! And by the way what were you talking to them about their kids playing basketball for?

Counter Service: Stop talking to the customers just serve them and move on, time is money.

Now Bring on Social Media

Social media is about engaging with people, actually chatting to them. That is most definitely not going to fly with a productivity mindset manager, especially when the results are hard to prove.

So as BenYoskovitz puts it

Unfortunately, too many mid-level and junior-level employees are forced to spend a disproportionate amount of their time figuring out how to justify things to their bosses ….

Marketing Will Tell Customers

Its not up to YOU to create a relationship with customers – marketing will TELL our customers we want a relationship with them.

Probably a bit harsh that line, but I spent twenty years in Corporate life before joining the excellent world of a Small to Medium business.

But there is an element of truth to it. Corporate marketing departments “control” the public message, including defining the companies relationship with clients. Depending on the value of the client that is.

Measurement is the Key

The 1980′s crop of managers are not dumb, ( well I hope I am not) our careers have been built around measurement. Measuring results is needed to justify decisions. That is just the way we were taught to think. However we all struggle to measure the intangible value of customer conversations (relationship building conversations).

Social media will in time develop the metrics to prove it works. Once it proves it and allowing for some time to change mindsets it will be adopted. And it does work, for example

We dumped google adwords and just use Social Media and our leads went up 83%.

True Customer Relation Building May Become in Vogue

And this may even flow on to the broader area of customer conversations. May be Dale Carnegie‘s principals for enhancing relationships may become in vogue again.

Become Genuinely Interested In Other People.
Be A Good Listener. Encourage Others To Talk About Themselves.
Talk In Terms Of The Other Person’s Interests.
Make The Other Person Feel Important — And Do It Sincerely.

Ultimately we will get back to talking to customers either on the phone, in the aisle, at the counter or on facebook etc. Because the proof will emerge that it pays to do so.

For example more companies like us will be able to show themselves and others that Social Media infact time anytime spent on customer conversations works.

Please add your comments!

About Us

Is Social Media the greatest revolution of our time? (francescofederico.net)
Legal Issues and Social Media Use in Organizations (othersidegroup.com)
Twitter and Foursquare Become the New Loyalty Program at Tasti D-Lite (mashable.com)

19 Feb

Seeking Funding to Expand Your Hire of Rental Business

The hire and rental business model can be extremely profitable.

Continuing growth can often encourage thoughts of how to expand the business. Often such expansion though requires investment funding.

However the question becomes how to approach an Angel Investor?

Like everything in business the best approach is to understand their thinking, as you would a customer.

This Video by Dr Tom Mcaskill, successful entrepreuner and academic provides a great insight in to this.

About Us

18 Feb

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 25 Oct

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week. We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Up the common theme here is Windows 7. It’s out – finally – and it’s awesome. I’ve been finding all sorts of really handy links which I think you’ll like, such as how to change settings, handy little apps and more. Check it out:

Wow this is a great idea – Gridvista Makes Organizing Screen Real Estate Simple [Downloads] http://tinyurl.com/yhb42ba #Lifehacker

This feature is something that sort of exists in Windows 7 already but takes it to the next level – what you can do is split your monitor into multiple monitors, so that you can maximise a program into a portion of your monitor and then maximise a seperate window into another portion of your monitor. What you’re left with is a few apps open on the screen at the same time, all into their tidy areas. Pretty handy for power users, check out the screenshots on the article link.

Great article – Top 10 Windows 7 Booster Apps [Lifehacker Top 10] http://tinyurl.com/yfnfoqg #Lifehacker

I won’t detail all of the Top 10 here so I encourage you to take a look yourself, but the summary here is tips for changing some of the look and feel of Windows 7 back to older styles of Windows for the technology phobics out there, in addition to useful jumplist applications for GMail and FireFox, which allow you to access application shortcuts from the taskbar which is handy (especially if you’re using a touchscreen). There are also a couple of super handy apps at the bottom – one of which I detailed last week, the alternate ALT+TAB application, but also a sinlge program that will install a whole pile of programs for you that you might use all the time – in one installation – which is really handy for people buying new PC’s and find downloading and installing all of their favourite utilities a drag. Check it out.

RT @makinglifeezy How to Design a Company Name, Logo and Colour Scheme – http://tr.im/CKmk Includes examples of the bad ones

Our very own marketing department put together this little gem of an article – a list of links to other sites detailing how to choose the core details of your business well. Great examples here of the right and wrong way of doing things, I found it quite educational.

Great bunch of links here to Windows 7 articles and free software – This Week’s Most Popular Posts [Highlights] http://bit.ly/34Vf7i

A pretty self explanatory post here – this article has a whole pile of links to good tips and handy apps and definately worth a read of you’ve just grabbed yourself a copy of Windows 7 or a thinking of doing so.

Here’s a huge pile of links to useful #Windows7 articles and tutorials – Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Windows 7 http://j.mp/3Fy0cc

… and another one! Consider this article the ultimate crash course in Windows 7. Forget about buying books or training courses, EVERYTHING is here. The best part about this article? I can guarantee that you’ll see something in the list here and you’ll say “wow I didn’t know it could do THAT!” Check it out!

WOW – Psystar Lets You Put Snow Leopard On A Non-Hacked PC http://bit.ly/4l1bge

Here’s a good way of somewhat balancing out all the excitement for Windows 7 – post an article about how you can install Mac OSX on a normal PC so that you don’t have to buy an expensive Mac. I’ve been reading other articles about people who are tried this out and they say it’s legit and works well – even on netbooks. If you’re willing to give it a try, then have a look at this.

Taskbar Meters Monitor Your Windows 7 Hardware in the Taskbar [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
Zune player in taskbar (bloggingabout.net)
Add CPU and memory meters to your Windows 7 taskbar (downloadsquad.com)
Gmail Alerts in Windows 7 Taskbar with Gmail Notifier Plus (paulspoerry.com)

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18 Feb

Social Media Addicts Guide to Surviving Xmas/ New Year

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Christmas can be a particularly hard time – especially for those of us addicted to Social Media !

So here is a simple guide to how to relate to Christmas interpretations of common jargon we use.

Firstly – We dont re-tweet presents we open them,

–

We dont make blog posts we open letter posts,

–

Christmas is about Face to Face not Facebook,

–

The only Digg we do is in to the bottom of the Esky (cooler) for another beer,

–

The only buzz should come from general family table chatter, (hmm unless novetly presents are involved)

–

MySpace is a reference to the spot you sit down at, or in the Southern Hemisphere where your going to have a Nanna nap after lunch in the heat,

Delicious is a reference to the quality of the meal, bookmarking it later does not qualify as a taking home a
doggie bag

Finally Stumble upon refers to not to a social bookmarking site rather the finding of another beer in the Esky when your thought you had run out.

Finally if you want to do something useful on the Computer.

For those of you with Children, Grand Children or even younger siblings here is the tool of the day- NORAD’s santa tracking web site.

I hope you enjoy and on behalf of all the staff here all the best to you and your family for Christmas and The New Year!!!

18 Feb

Hire and Rental Real Time Availability Checking

Rental and hire companies often have multiple stock items.

However knowing whether you have enough items in stock to satisfy a customer order can often be an issue.

This issue is compounded by the need to ensure that the stock is available for whole period of the order.

And if not, which other customer orders will be effected?

Furthermore with its inbuilt over booking facility directly linked to [intlink id="1497" type="post"]cross hire management[/intlink], any short falls in stock can be efficiently and effectively managed!

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18 Feb

Creating a hire rental Video that works

For some hire and rental companies, video can be a useful tool in promoting the business.

The incredibly easy to use – integration of HireEzy desktop software, with your on-line store and youtube has enabled clients to become creative in video marketing.

Here are some examples of how video, can be used to promote your hire or rental business.

For example:

Specific Solution Video’s: If you offer a solution to clients, such as complete wedding solutions, event solutions, even construction hire or rental solutions – then video’s can be an extremely effective tool in your marketing armoury.

General Promotional Videos: These are generic video’s demonstrating your full range of services.

Safety or Installation Videos: As discussed in previous posts, this can be a great tool in reducing business risk and product damages.

So how to make a Video, well the link below shows some ideas, further ideas are available on our youtube site.

HOW TO: Create Online Video That Works

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Remember HireEzy helps make marketing, even your digital marketing a standard and natural part of your business processes – HireEzy puts you in control!!!

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18 Feb

Increasing Average Age of Equipment Rental or Hire – Impact

Following the global financial turmoil and subsequent recession there has been evidence of an understandable increase in the average age of equipment on rent or hire.

The reasons why are:

Vendor Financing

Vendor financing has been significantly curtailed.

The Car rental industry is one obvious case in point, where the average age of even the major rental fleets is increasing.

The key reason is the lack of capital. Previously the major Car Rental companies relied on financing from the major automotive manufacturers. Such financing had been cutback substantially, for all the reasons discussed in the News and in Congress.

Bank Financing

The other form of new equipment financing has been by bank loans in various forms. The general tightening of credit from the Banks and other major institutions has meant that it has been harder to finance the acquisition of new stock. Despite being bailed out by the tax-payers around the world, the banks were reluctant to continue providing credit to Small business to fund new equipment purchases. The reason cited by some banks was that Small Business was a credit risk. (Side note: Interesting assessment by the Banks, from what I remember they were the one’s that created the GFC, they were the one’s tax-payers had to bail out – so who is the risk? )

With lines of credit curtailed many small businesses were unable to fund new rental and hire equipment purchases. Instead electing to extend the life of the equipment.

Funding From Asset Disposal

During the harshest periods of the downturn, older stock items attracted lower sales attention and hence realized sales value. Such lower values on sale for older items, meant less cash to purchase to acquire new equipment.

Furthermore, these lower sales value a further flow on effect. When the actual value received at sale is lower than the book value then the difference has to be written off. When large volumes of items or a major capital equipment are disposed of through sale the impact on the rental or hire companies balance sheet can be significant. This balance sheet impact further reduces the companies ability to borrow capital or maintain a certain line of credit from the banks.

Cash Flow

The other major financing option was through cash flow. That is cash flow used to fund (pay) for new equipment when it was on a payment plan of some description.

Secondly, the loss of the first two meant that hire and rental businesses became and still remain primarily focused on cash flow management.

Even with the Green Shoots of recovery around the World, including an Indian summer for the hire industry in the UK at present, many hire and rental companies continue to manage cash flow, primarily through cost containment.

Impacts

Therefore with an aging rental or hire equipment pool must creates a higher demand for repair, servicing and inspection. The frequency rate or intensity of inspection/ servicing invariably increases with age. But here are some tools that may help:

You Tube: That may surprise you, but You Tube can be an extremely effective in reducing equipment damage by providing a visual of how to assemble, dis-assemble or maintain an equipment. To read more on this read the article on How Rental and Hire Companies can use You Tube You Tube management is fully integrated in to HireEzy, making this an extremely simple process.

HireEzy 2.1: Includes product management functions such as equipment service scheduling, maintenance and history.

Rental and Hire’s Business Future

The one for certain is that this situation wont last forever. The hire and rental industry is dynamic and progressive. It will no doubt commence updating equipment as soon as practical.

More importantly the Hire and Rental industry is fundamental the recovery, as explained in the article Global Innovation Depends on

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18 Feb

Is Social Media Marketing Worth the Effort?

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Growth of Social Media is staggering but are the returns worth the effort?

We trailed just using Social Media Marketing for three months. We dropped Adwords all together and found that our sales leads increased by over 80% and our Alexa Web Site ranking went up 1000% in the same period.

But It Does Takes Effort

Effective Social Media marketing does take effort. Why because it involves engaging people, its not about SELL SELL SELL. Its about engagement with interesting content, discussions and even etiquette.

Social Media is just that its social!

Content

People find interesting and informative content appealing. Rarely do they find 100% sales literature appealing. Rather they would rather read or view material that informs, explains or entertains.

Generally blogs provide the interesting content and web sites the more specific sales information. However producing interesting and engaging content articles for your blog does take time and effort. Allowing 3- 4 hours a week to write articles for the blog is reasonable planning guide.

The type of blog articles you write you should be informative, engaging or entertaining not in your face sales. For example, if you are a Party Rental/ Hire Company, write articles about how to plan an event , eg a backyard wedding etc. Or in this case we are writing about social media marketing, not selling our hire and rental business management software that has integrated social media marketing.

One of key point to remember to seed in your key words in to the article. Blogs are also good for using less frequently used words associated with your business as well.

Let People Know About Your Blog Article

This is the social part of social media marketing.

Having written an engaging article you need to let people know about it. This is where Twitter and Facebook really come in to play. However you need to invest time and effort in building up your Twitter and Facebook following. More relevant followers means more people likely to read your post.

However communities take time to build, you need to invest time in listening and responding to what they are saying. That is being a good community member. This can take more than a couple of hours per week probably longer realistically if you are serious.

Effort Versus Return

So let us say you spend four to five hours per week on writing blog content and building your social media following then you need to have a return.

Interestingly Nielson cited that around 17% of time on the internet is now spent on social media.

Cost. The cost of your time is not just the salary on-cost it is also the opportunity cost. That is what else could you have been doing. Also a consideration is your Ad-words spend. Social media may enable you to save this money or at least reduce your spend per month.

Return. The return is dependent on what you objective. For most small to medium sized businesses the primary objective will most often be sales leads. For us it worked, but for your business it may differ.

Our Returns. We found that through this process our Blog (content focused) Unique Visitor rate increased from not much to a few hundred per day. Our web site (product sales focused) increased proportionally leading to an 80% increase in sales leads through the web site.

Key Lessons Learnt

We learnt some critical lessons through our trial, which were:

Have a Plan;
Be Disciplined and above and beyond all else; and
Be Sincere.

We were lucky in that we approached the trial with genuine sincerity in our engagements with our social media community. We went in with the view of genuinely learning from others in our social media community and we have – it has been brilliant.

For us, yes there is a real effort needed but the returns are greater than just an excellent growth in sales leads – we have gained far more from what we have learnt from others.

If you have any similar experiences or even different views please take the time to add your comments – they are most welcome!

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10 Most Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing and How to Avoid Them (slideshare.net)
Is Anyone Really Listening? Social Media Marketing (freelanceswitch.com)
Poll Result: Most Popular Social Networking Tools for Online … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
Learning How to Start Out in Social Media Marketing (nichetitans.com)

18 Feb

Improving Cash flow for Hire Rental Management Companies

An increasing number of our hire and rental customers are talking to us about they can improve cash flow in these tough economic times.

Cash flow is crucial to the success of every business, especially to hire businesses and rental management companies.

Delayed customer payments can tighten your company’s access to working capital, thereby restricting your capacity for growth. This is the most common discussion topic amongst our customers – payment deferrals by major accounts and long term hires.

We use Ezidebit to manage our cash flow and payments, it has worked brilliantly for us. (please note we have no financial relationship nor related business ownership with Ezidebit.)

Ezidebit provides you with tailored payment solutions to minimise these cash flow concerns and enable your business to grow and prosper into the future. Ezidebit offers a fully automatic collection solution, suitable for regular recurring fees, variable invoiced payments or payment plans.

We have found that with Ezidebit’s direct debit payment system we have gained not only gain greater control but a real reduction in outstanding payments. More importantly we no longer have the emotional and time drain spent in chasing payments.

Ezidebit can have your business set up and signing up customers within a day.

Their contact information is www.ezidebit.com.au , phone 1300 763 256 or email info@ezidebit.com.au

About Us

18 Feb

Free Wedding Planning Software

Here is a great value add to wedding hire or wedding rental companies clients.

Wedding Decorating Ideas is a blog with a great range of wedding decorating ideas.

It also has Free wedding planning software

The site doesnt compete with you as it doesnt hire or rent wedding equipment.

However just be aware of the annoying pop up that appears occaisionally.

Remember if you are a Wedding Hire or Wedding Rental company we provide the world’s most innovative wedding hire software or wedding rental software business management system to help run your business. Includes complete booking management, financials, digital and social media marketing PLUS MORE.

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18 Feb

Twitter Spam

Rarely do we make any third party posts, but we recently came accross this one by Bernard Moon on Mashable.Com

It is well worth reading, the link is below

Twitter Spam: 3 Ways Scammers are Filling Twitter With Junk

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18 Feb

Political Cartoonists and Advertising – what is the link?

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The question is what have Political Cartoonists got to do with the Business Advertising, specifically advertising?

On face value the question would seem quite silly, but it is not.

Print Media advertising has a been a key part of the hire industry and rental industry advertising mix for decades!

But is print media advertising it still effective?

Traditional newspapers and serious print media are under serious threat. Not convinced, then consider this – In 2009 alone nearly 90 USA newspapers or magazines have closed or migrated to just web delivery. Taking nearly 9000 jobs with them! Erica Smith a journalist herself has been mapping the decline of the traditional media for years, her blog is universally regarded.

Update an article just published today, 1 Sep 09 on social mashable that Newspaper revenues have declined by 29% compared to the same quarter last year. This is a dramatic drop. To read the full article click here

Why the decline?

The traditional business model of Newspapers is advertising revenues fund quality journalism which attracts a readership demographic. The attracted readership demographic appeals to particular advertisers who in turn then pay for the newspaper advertising. However things are changing:

Increasingly people would rather go on line and read what they want from where they want when they want.
Secondly, user generated news content is replacing serious journalistic analysis and commentary.
Finally, as readership has declined companies etc have moved their advertising from print to digital.

So back to the Political Cartoonists

Political Cartoonists have become a barometer of the health and relevance of the Traditional Media. As one USA political cartoonist during a NPR radio interview stated, a decade ago their were over 300 print media employed political cartoonists in the USA now their are less than 50. The reason is that the advertising revenues of newspapers has declined, forcing newspapers to cut back on staff, including the visual editorial staff such as cartoonists.

Cartoonists like journalists are critical in attracting or maintaining a readership. Each incremental loss of such staff, eg cartoonists, reduces the newspapers readership appeal or reach into a market demographic. It is this market demographic reach that appeals to the advertisers.

So if newspapers are cutting back on quality journalism, including political cartoonists then the effect could be a reduction in their readership. Therefore if readership declines (market demographic reach), then the effectiveness of advertising through such newspapers begins to become a consideration.

Print Advertising

The question then arising for all businesses (or our focus specifically Hire and Rental companies) becomes is newspaper advertising still an effective marketing channel?

Judging from anecdotal evidence many businesses, hire and rental companies included, have voted with their keyboards and have begun to spread their marketing budgets into on-line marketing and even social media. Evidence also exists in other industry sectors, eg in a recent article in Tire Business one owner cited that in 5 years his print advertising budget had been reduced from over 50% to 11%, (click on quote to access the full article – well worth reading)

..., who operates 15 stores across Michigan, said half his ad budget goes to direct mail and TV, but only 11 percent goes to newspaper advertising. Five years ago, more than half of Northwest Tire’s ad budget went towards newspaper ads.

The Answer

So the question was what have political cartoonists got to do with advertising trends? Well the answer is – as the number of employed political cartoonists in the traditional print media declines so does the business spend on traditional print media advertising.

About Us

Hire and rental management systems like HireEzy make the use of such on-line marketing easy to use and part of the natural hire and rental business process. For more information contact us at sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

Older posts »

Cross Platform
MAC & WINDOWS SOFTWARE

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Safety Instructions issued to Clients.

Increasing Means of Access.

Off Site Safety Instructions.

Client Site Safety or Maintenance Checks.

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This is the first in a series of articles designed to help your hire company or rental company improve your website rankings.

Or You can do the SEO yourself!

First How Search Engines Work

Second A Basic Introduction to Understanding SEO

Next Article – Getting Started

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Why couldn’t someone release this years ago – XP Quick Fix Plus Repairs Common Windows XP Errors http://bit.ly/38Hhtd

This is pretty handy – Cache My Work Restores Your Workspace After a Restart [Downloads] http://bit.ly/2Ffdyv

This is a great tip – Adding Flip 3D to Windows 7′s Taskbar http://tinyurl.com/ybb85pn #Channel10

Interesting statistics – Windows 7 Market Share Climbing Fast http://tinyurl.com/ydlm8mt #Channel10

Geek alert! – Coke Zero Has Zero Calories And Sugar, But Is High In Spy Cameras http://bit.ly/2uIK8h

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Did You Know

What are Alexa Rankings?

The Only Advertising on Our Site is Our Own – So Why Bother About Rankings?

Under Rated Benefits of Alexa

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Did you know?

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Risk Reduction:

Reduce OHS and Public Liability Risk:

Reduce Product Damages:

Reduce Customer Dissatisfaction:

Increase Revenue:

Examples

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So what are the prediction trends for events and party – starting with 2010.

And One Special Mention

If anyone else has any thoughts please share them with us!

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A key cost driver is often the high volume of product images needed

Creating Low Cost Quality Product Photo’s

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Managing Separate Business Units

HireEzy – Allows Up to Five Business Units

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Major Business Issue

Why!

Cost

Eliminate the Cost and Take Control

Go Beyond!

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The are stuggle has to come to a head because of Social Media

All Customer Conversations are Idle Chatter

Now Bring on Social Media

Marketing Will Tell Customers

Measurement is the Key

True Customer Relation Building May Become in Vogue

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Our Prediction for Equipment, Party, Event Rental / Hire

Now for the Social Trends of 2010 by TrendSpotter

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However the question becomes how to approach an Angel Investor?

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Despite this slow start- Growth Has Doubled

Caution Needed

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Wow this is a great idea – Gridvista Makes Organizing Screen Real Estate Simple [Downloads] http://tinyurl.com/yhb42ba #Lifehacker

Great article – Top 10 Windows 7 Booster Apps [Lifehacker Top 10] http://tinyurl.com/yfnfoqg #Lifehacker

RT @makinglifeezy How to Design a Company Name, Logo and Colour Scheme – http://tr.im/CKmk Includes examples of the bad ones