Small Business

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

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

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

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

About Us

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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10 Jan

What is the Next Generation of Business Software for Hire and Rental

In answering the question, it is worth reflecting back on the History.

First Generation Hire Software and Rental Management Software

The First Generation of Rental and Hire Software really began depending on who you believe in the 1980′s. Certainly there may have been earlier versions written for mainframes, but the packaged software started with the development of the affordable desktop. The packaged software market, first generation, emerged from the development of point solutions for specific early adopting customers.

These early versions focused on the basic process of managing bookings. Providing no more than a simple process of managing inventory, bookings and client records. However their effectiveness in bring business value should not be under-estimated.

Second Generation Hire Software and Rental Management Software

The Second Generation of Rental and Hire Software could be argued to have emerged with the growth of Windows, inparticular Win 95. This generation of rental and hire software built upon the popularity of Windows. Utilizing the look and feel of Windows, these systems began to emerge in the mid to late 90′s.

This second generation of hire software and rental software systems expanded the affordability and popularity amongst hire and rental companies.

These second generation systems grew to expand connection to useful business devices such as Point of Sales (POS), License Scanners, Bar Code Scanners and Cash Drawers etc. Second generation companies stress connectivity to these devices as their main selling point. Whereas as you will read Third Generation systems include such connectivity to devices as standard functionality.

However a major limitation of these older second generation systems was their reliance on interfacing to other critical business systems, in particular Accounting Packages and Customer Relationship Management Systems. Not having fully integrated Accounting and Marketing meant that hire and rental company managers were unable to truly and quickly analyse the true performance of their business.

The final death knell for the second generation hire and rental software systems was the maturity of the web. The web has grown from a novelty in the 1990′s and a ridiculous new financial business paradigm shift in the early 2000′s (dot.com boom) to a maturing business tool as we approach the end of the decade.

The web is now the primary source of leads for the best performing rental and hire companies.(most cite the web as providing over 50% of new business leads). In effect the web has created a second shop front, a virtual store that operates 24 by 7. This virtual store is as much a part of a hire and rental business as is the physical store.

Furthermore the web is also a primary source of incredibly useful business tools, such as Google Maps, On-line Bank reconciliation, Colloborative Event Planning, Contractor Management, Document Storage and Access, as well as communication tools like Email etc.

The old second generation hire and rental software systems were aimed at providing a solution for the physical store . Most such systems because of their under-pinning technical architecture and technology were in the main incapable of being stretched any further to enable the web to become an instrinsic part of a Hire and Rental business.

This led to the rise of the Third Generation Hire and Rental Systems.

Third Generation Hire Software and Rental Management Software

The third generation systems are Hire and Rental software products that instinsically include the web store and access to web business tools within the software package. This generation of software enables hire and rental businesses to trade in a physical store and a virtual store all with in the one package.

Furthermore they enable the use of high value business efficiency tools such as Google Maps, outlook email integration to with client records and on-line collaboration etc.

Finally they are an all inclusive business software system that includes critical business functionality such as Accounting, CRM and Digital Marketing. This inclusion ensures that hire and rental businesses can finally analyse in detail their businesses. Such things as profitability by customer or by product, forward cashflow forecasts based on actual bookings etc in near real time.

Third Generation systems reflect the business need of hire and rental companies. Affordable, easy to use and complete business functionality, the third generation systems are growing rapidly. One key driver of this growth is the Global Recession, as hire and rental companies seek solutions that both contribute to sales growth whilst reducing operating costs.

Second Generation systems are still available on the market and will be for some time. However these systems are increasingly being replaced by Third Generation systems. As this trend continues to gain pace, many hire and rental companies on older second generation systems could be left exposed, not only to business risk but the potential for declining market share.

HireEzy is the Global Leader in the Third Generation Hire and Rental Software Market. As one recent client who converted from a Second Generation system said

its like going from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age – it is incredible!!!!!

Want more information or an on-line demonstration, then contact us at sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

07 Jan

A simple business guide to Social Bookmarking

| 2 comments

: Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

Social Bookmarking is one one element of a Small to Medium businesses Social Media Marketing plan.

Social Bookmarking can be really good at helping bring more traffic to your site or to add credibility to your articles.

Basic Understanding of Social Bookmarking

When you find a site or on-line article of interest you can bookmark the site in your browser for later reference. But there are limitations with this:

Organizing and Searching

Being forever on the net doing market research, I am always finding sites or web articles that I think I would like to look at later. The problem is that in reality I end up with so many bookmarked pages and a really bad structure for filing them – that I can never find them again.

Some pages I book marked, could well have been filed under market research, hire industry data or even say social media statistics. Trying to remember where I put it became a real brain ache.

Sharing

The next limitation is sharing the articles with other people. Aside from not wanting to download every site or article and waste bandwidth, I want to be easily able to share articles with others. This is achievable using the browser bookmark system but it is cumbersome.

Others Opinions

If I do share an article I would like to track their opinions and how valuable they think the article is. Also how they would categorize the article, ie what keywords would they file it under?

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking solves these limitations. It enables you to:

Book mark a site or article of interest;
Save the link;
Organise your links by using multiple tags;
Search by for your links by tags;
Include other people publicly saved articles who have used the same tags, hence enriching your search; and
Assess the value of an article based on others people opinions and ratings.

Why you should do it!

It is this last point that offers the real value to a small business.

If you create an article, lets say through your blog, you can submit it to a Social Bookmarking site.

More Readers. The first reason you would submit the article is that it potentially offers the opportunity to attract more readers. The social bookmarking site creates a new link from their site back to your blog, good for in-bound links.

Credibility. Others can read the article and rate it as well as make comments. The credibility of the article is increased the more others rate it well or comment accordingly. Yes there is a risk of the reverse happening as well.

Keywords. Other reading a good article may often tag that article with their own keywords. These tags along with yours are then indexed by search engines. This can be great for the search engine ranking of your article which in turn can flow through to more traffic to your site.

A well done article can be incredibly powerful in increasing traffic to your site!

Managing the Risks

Social bookmarking technology is generally free and easy to use. However whilst the technology is easy to understand the social groups that use may not be.

If you ever changed school can you remember the first day? The way they talked, the terms they used and what they talked about?

If you were smart you just listened for a while until you got use to them and their cultural norms. Hey why risk being labeled a “dork” better to just hang back for a while.

Social Bookmarking groups are exactly the same. Each social bookmarking service, and there are a number of them, seems have its own distinctive culture or informal rules and interests.

Social Bookmarking Services

There are numerous social bookmarking services. But as discussed above it pays to select the right one for you. This article gives a brief summary of each of the top ten and their focus.

Finally

The benefits of social bookmarking for small to medium businesses can be excellent.

But remember it is social by nature, so spend time getting to know the community of followers for your selected social bookmarking service. Watch the types of articles that are most popular and unpopular. Take the time to comment and rate others community members posts. Invest time in becoming known as a good community member and they will reciprocate.

Cross Platform
MAC & WINDOWS SOFTWARE

HireEzy – Hire and Rental Software

Small Business

Resources for Hire and Rental Entrepreneurs

About Us

Creating Low Cost Product Photos for Business

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

Creating Low Cost Quality Product Photo’s

About Us