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When your business takes off, are you ready for it? Can you cope with fast expansion? This is just a dream when starting a new business, but be prepared, it does happen. Sometimes a lot faster than anticipated with the right ingredients: excellent products, a well designed site, hard work and some luck.

As your business grows the workload grows proportionately

When starting you may work long hard hours. 15 hours a day, seven days per week is not uncommon. At some point the results of your focus, passion and hard work are rewarded – and the orders turn from a trickle to a flood that threatens to overwhelm you.

Managing the workload can become a real problem

As a sole operator in a home business I learnt as I went, and did not put systems in place until I needed them (lack of forward thinking!) Processing an average of 15 orders daily required a minimum ten-hour working day just to deal with the orders and volume of email. I also worked in the evenings when the house was quiet to keep my books up to date, research trends and market.

My orders arrived on the secure server, by fax, also by International 0800, by check and by phone. Each order was printed off the server, then each credit card had to have approval – a phone call to the bank to get an authorization number. The bank had a policy of not being allowed to authorize more than 5 Cards at a time if one was not in a retail shop with customers waiting, therefore it sometimes required several calls, gaining authorization in blocks of 5.

Each customer was sent (manually) an email confirming their order. I did use a series of template letters but even this involved a lot of cutting and pasting – more time!

The next step was to manually type the information into my database, and then type the address details in to a Labeling program.

Once the orders were packed and collected by the Courier, everything needed writing up

for banking, including full credit card numbers and authorizations. Then it was a trip to the bank, several times weekly.

In amongst this there were never-ending emails to be answered, marketing to be done,as well as all the other things required to keep a home together as a one parent family. It was just too much. I desperately needed help, so I employed a housekeeper and a part time office assistant.

As my Equity grew I moved into a position where I could make some choices, and one of those was to move back to the Country, but I could not envisage myself being a slave to a Computer in a lifestyle I loved.

The solution was obvious: automate as much as possible

A relatively small investment of under $2000 saw me move to a different host to accommodate real time credit card processing, and secured me a Programmer to write the automation of the database.

I’m finished with 15 hour working days

Now, when an order arrives on the secure server the money is in the bank and the customer already has their confirmation email. A click of a button transfers the customer details to the database. Another click sees the labels produced, and the only thing left for me to do is to put the labels on the pre-packaged products.

Automation has saved money and time, and added reliability