7 signs that you’re working too hard
Do you run into any of these seven challenges running your business?
A mountain guide service faces a few unique situations—mountain aside—that demand extra effort to keep the business on track. If any of these challenges do ring a bell (or an alarm), it might be time for you to give your business a kick in the pants.
- Your client contact info is all over the place. You have numbers in your phone, your guides have numbers in their phones, climbs are scheduled on a wall calendar, emergency info is overflowing a file drawer, and visit history lives on class sign-in sheets.
- You find yourself dreading “you owe me money” conversations with your unpaid clients. You love your clients. But why, why, why do they forget to bring their checkbooks on the day they’re supposed to pay?
- You think you have waivers for all your clients, but you’d have to go through over 2,000 pieces of paper to verify. You require that your guides have clients sign these, but you can’t be 100% sure a few folks haven’t been missed—or that the waivers don’t come back unreadable, covered in coffee and dirt.
- You and your guides don’t have time or tools to properly check people into classes and appointments on the spot. While you think attendance will be taken later, you get busy, lose scraps of paper scribbled with attendance and it slips by the wayside.
- You don’t have a way for clients to sign up and pay for classes on your site. With the mobile trend steadily increasing, people aren’t wanting to pick up the phone; they expect a way to schedule online. Seems so old school, right? Definitely a sign that systems need improving.
- You use clipboards and stacks of paper waivers, contact sheets, surveys at the trailhead. Why chase after papers swept up by the wind when you can keep all this info in the cloud (and not that one looming, threatening rain on your climb).
- You’re doing a climb in Utah, but have guides out in Denver, New York, and Washington. Do you really know who’s scheduled where and when? How many clients they’re climbing with and for how long?
Consider your alternative “Front Desk” reality
- You don’t worry about clients needing to pay. They’re automatically billed each month and the money is deposited into your bank account within 48 hours. Your clients are notified if their payments fail or if their credit cards are about to expire. They can even log in and update their credit card information themselves.
- Anything you ever need for a client can be done from any mobile device. You can quickly see purchase details, visit history, and contact information.
- Contacting clients is easy. You can call the client by tapping the number in their profile from your phone or log a note in their profile and choose for it to remain private or send it to them in email.
- You and your staff can quickly check in clients from your mobile device at the base of the mountain. You’ll instantly be alerted if a client hasn’t paid or hasn’t signed a liability waiver. The waiver is digitally signed and stored in the client profile so you can always find it.
- It’s easy to track class attendance and clients’ use of any of your services, and straightforward to see if your clients’ payments are up-to-date. Front Desk notifies both the business owner and their clients of client account issues so revenue doesn’t get lost between the cracks.
With Front Desk, our clients can book online and fill out our forms before their activity. But more importantly for us, they can do this at the meeting point, the trailhead, or on top of a mountain if they need to. My business is inherently mobile, and because Front Desk gets this, my company runs as smoothly as it possibly can.
—Marty Molitoris, owner of Alpine Endeavors
Transparency and accountability are Front Desk design principles. The result: managing a business takes less effort and is more profitable. Front Desk keeps your finger on the pulse of your business when you can’t be in the office all day, every day. Sounds as simple as it is. Clear the clutter and streamline your processes. You’ll save time and feel the freedom that comes from running an organized business. Learn more at Front Desk.
