Tag Archive for: operations

Connectwise consulting

ConnectWise Streamlines Operations

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In today’s world, where technology is rapidly advancing, businesses must use software systems like ConnectWise to streamline their operations and improve their bottom line and ConnectWise streamlines operations seamlessly. ConnectWise is a software platform that can help businesses develop a sustainable strategy for their operations by leveraging their existing software systems.

ConnectWise is a software solution designed for managed service providers (MSPs) and businesses that provides a suite of tools for managing their operations, including customer relationship management (CRM), project management, billing, and more. In this blog post, we will explore how ConnectWise software can help businesses develop a sustainable strategy for their operations.

 A Sustainable Operations Strategy

One of the primary ways ConnectWise can help businesses develop a sustainable strategy for their operations is by integrating with their existing software systems. ConnectWise is designed to integrate with a wide range of software systems including those involved with:

  • Accounting
  • Marketing
  • Sales

By integrating with these systems, businesses can streamline their operations and improve their efficiency, resulting in significant cost savings.

Efficient Project Management

Another way ConnectWise can help businesses develop a sustainable strategy for their operations is by providing a central location for managing their projects. With ConnectWise, businesses can create and manage projects, assign tasks to team members, track progress, and more. This helps businesses stay organized and on track, ensuring that projects are completed on time and within budget.

A Complete CRM Tool

ConnectWise also provides businesses with a CRM solution that can help them manage their customer relationships. With ConnectWise’s CRM, businesses can track customer interactions, manage leads, and automate marketing campaigns. This helps businesses improve their customer service and increase their customer retention rates.

 Powerful Billing Solution

In addition to these features, ConnectWise provides businesses with a powerful billing solution that can help them automate their invoicing and payment processes. With ConnectWise’s billing solution, businesses can create invoices, send them to customers, and track payments. This helps businesses improve their cash flow and reduce their administrative burden.

There is no doubt that ConnectWise streamlines operations and is a wise business choice, and while ConnectWise provides businesses with a single operational platform, we have found that most clients get overwhelmed with integrating into their businesses, which is why we created a ConnectWise All Inclusive Partnership called TeamFocus. This partnership allows us to partner with your team and will empower your business to maximize your sales processes, your operational systems, and your finance tools by using existing systems like ConnectWise.

FocusPlanit is one of the industry’s premier ConnectWise® Consultants serving the entire United States. Contact us today and let us be your partner in success. You can learn more about our offerings and team on our website.

managing holiday stress

Managing Holiday Stress

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We’ve identified tips for managing holiday stress at home and in the workplace. Holidays are usually the happiest time of the year because we have additional quality time with family and friends and often share in meals and other uplifting social functions. But at the same time, the added scheduling pressures, sometimes indulgent eating, and other departures from our normal routines adds stress that can be difficult to balance, not to mention the added stress around COVID!

Here are 5 simple lifestyle tips to help get you manage holiday stress:

1. Don’t over-commit 

As much as it seems like you want to attend every holiday social, party, and dinner, sometimes it is absolutely overwhelming to do it all and still manage your daily life. Select those things that matter most and politely decline the things that don’t, and you will thank yourself later. No one expects you to do it all, so don’t expect it of yourself.

2. Plan self-care activities

If the joy and chaos of the holidays really does overwhelm you, then schedule some planned downtime. Set time aside to treat yourself to a facial, beauty treatment, get a massage, or engage in a quiet activity that lets you reset and gather your energy.

3. Maintain as much routine as possible

Holidays are terrible for routines. While a few can just go with the flow, most of us rely on regular structure to keep our lives manageable. If you stick to the basics of your routine (when you get up, when you eat, when you exercise, etc.), then you will have more emotional and physical energy to manage the holiday chaos. Sticking to #1 (don’t over-commit) is helpful in this regard.

4. Don’t neglect sleep

When it comes to schedules and routines, the most important routine might be sleep. If you neglect sleep, then everything else will be more stressful and harder to manage.

So stick with your regular sleep schedule as much as possible. It might get disrupted by a party or two, or holiday travel, but if you can keep a regular bedtime and a regular waking time on as many days as possible, your body will better tolerate the stress that comes your way. If you have trouble sleeping due to stress, there are natural products you can take to promote better sleep.

5. Stay active

Exercise is recognized by experts such as those at Mayo Clinic as an important stress-management tool that can keep your body and mind more stress-tolerant all the time.

Too often at the holidays we let regular exercise go by the wayside (eh-hem routine…) along with the rest of our self-care. Keeping exercise on your calendar is challenging but still very important.

Helping Employees Manage Holiday Stress

There are a few simple actions managers can do to help boost morale and help employees manage holiday stress including:

  • Incorporate wellness breaks to give employees a chance to refocus‍
  • Help employees prioritize projects to manage pending deadlines and/or incorporate a consulting partner to help manage back-end office activities‍
  • Encourage employees to stay home when sick
  • Educate employees about wellness related activities including sharing this blog

For more information on this topic, or to learn how FocusPlanit can help your organization be more effective and efficient, contact our team. FocusPlanit serves the entire United States and is the industry’s premier team of highly qualified ConnectWise, QuickBooks, Wise-Sync, GoZynta, CharTec, ConnectBooster experts who have dedicated years of their professional life implementing and optimizing these solutions. Contact us today to schedule a complimentary consultation.

Teamwork and integration concept

Reasons To Hire A ConnectWise Consulting Partner

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Stop allowing your ConnectWise programs to control you and start focusing your efforts on building a better workflow by utilizing a ConnectWise consulting partner. Simple goals can seem overwhelming when you don’t know where to start. A consulting partner can help turn those goals into measurable solutions.

Here are the top five reasons to hire a ConnectWise Consulting Partner:

  1. There is never enough time to train users and run your business. Even with an in-house power user, day-to-day business functions take precedent and keep you from empowering your staff to utilize ConnectWise programs to their fullest extent.
  2. You don’t know what you don’t know. Have you ever found yourself wondering if there are functions of your programs available, but you just don’t know where to find them or how to use them? A consultant can help your existing programs become work horses for your workflow.
  3. Too many tools, not enough integration. Leverage your sales software systems like ConnectWise and ConnectWise Sell to expedite your sales process from gathering and organizing leads to procuring the products and develop a sustainable strategy for operations. A consultant can help manage agreements and invoices as well as integrating systems like ConnectWise and QuickBooks.
  4. You need reports with data that will drive decisions. Let’s face it, we all can’t be data exports. Using a consultant will help you leverage your systems to improve financial reporting, processes, and accuracy, ensuring your bottom line is reliable and protected.
  5. Hiring the right person to manage your programs is next to impossible. Rising costs involved with onboarding a new employee in the current economy is difficult for any budget. Not to mention finding the right person for the job is exhausting and a full-time job itself. A consultant can provide you all the solutions you need at the right time for a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time employee.

Master your systems by partnering with a ConnectWise consultant in order to bring new revenue into your business. A strategic partner can help you develop the right strategy to meet your business goals, support in your sales processes, operational systems, and your finance tools, so you can keep your business running smoothly.

FocusPlanit is one of the industry’s premier ConnectWise Consultants serving the entire United States. Collectively our team has over 30 years of experience with ConnectWise and can help you optimize your programs and systems transforming them from an expense into your most valuable asset. Contact us today and let us be your partner in success. You can learn more about our offerings and team at https://focusplanit.com/.

Running an Efficient and Effective Organization

Running an Efficient and Effective Organization

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Businesses everywhere now more than ever are experiencing pressures to run an efficient and effective organization with limited resources. It is critical business processes and operations are designed in a way that limits bottlenecks, reduces duplicative efforts, and improves processing time. It is critical organizations effectively use technology to automate and streamline processes across the organization with tools like ConnectWise. By becoming more efficient and effective the organization can devote its time and resources to delivering the services their customers rely on.

Current State: What’s Broken

Organizations evaluating efficiency and effectiveness often struggle to answer these types of questions:

Are our processes and policies aligned to industry best practice?

Are our operating procedures streamlined?

Do we leverage our current technology to automate processes?

Do we duplicate any steps in our processes, creating waste and inefficiency?

Do we have an internal system for managing time effectively?

Do we have an effective system for account management of existing and potential clients?

Future State: A Plan for Improvement

If you are not happy with the answers to the above questions, a process review can help you determine the next course of action. You will need a qualified partner to help you get on track to an efficient and effective operations. You will need to identify current state versus future desired state

This review will provide you with three key insights:

  1. A strategy to meet your business goals.
  2. Identify the right structure and necessary tools needed to keep your office running smoothly.
  3. Leverage support in your sales processes, your operational systems, and your finance tools.

Each division of your organization should be evaluated, including sales processes, operations and finance. This will ensure that the final plan ensures all areas of the organization will be streamlined for efficiency and effectiveness. Optimize your systems and change it from an expense into your most valuable asset.

Sales processes include: quoting, sales management, sales reporting, product catalogs, opportunity management, leads management, procurement, and sales orders.

Operations include: automation, service desk, dispatching, project management, time management, scheduling, RMM integration, KPI reporting, SLA management, vendor management, relationship management, and onboarding.

Financial systems include: invoicing, tools in place like QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, etc., agreements, reporting, payment collection integrations, purchase orders, expense management, product catalog management.

Increasing your organizational efficiency and effectiveness means you will increase the productivity you can achieve, given your specific number of resources. The more output delivered using those same resources, the more efficient your organization will be. Sounds simple but without the help of a consulting partner like FocusPlanit can you spend valuable time “spinning your wheels”.

For more information on this topic, or to learn how FocusPlanit can help your organization be more effective and efficient, contact our team. FocusPlanit serves the entire United States and is the industry’s premier team of highly qualified ConnectWise, QuickBooks, Wise-Sync, GoZynta, CharTec, ConnectBooster experts who have dedicated years of their professional life implementing and optimizing these solutions. Contact us today to schedule a complimentary consultation.

The ConnectWise® Platform: The Powerhouse Your Business Needs

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What Does the ConnectWise® Platform Offer?

In short, ConnectWise® provides businesses with a single operational platform. The platform offers solutions for business management, unified management, cybersecurity management, and expert services.

Let’s look at each offering a bit closer:

The business management tool, ConnectWise Manage® brings order to your operations, ensuring that your teams are communicating and information is effectively being shared. It covers everything from help desk workflow to procurement and even time tracking and project management. Not the mention the insightful reporting tools.

ConnectWise Unified Management® software brings solutions together to create a service delivery offering fit for a Technical Service Provider of any size. Monitor, manage, and backup networks and environments of all shapes and sizes.

ConnectWise Fortify® allows you to stay ahead of security threats with advanced tools to monitor networks, identify risks, and have strategies in place to maintain 24/7 security for you and your clients.

ConnectWise® expert services can provide businesses with a fully staffed help desk for day-to-day tasks or highly skilled technicians to handle advance networking issues. Already have your own technicians but have an ad-hoc project? They can cover that as well.

The Implementation Help You Need

So you made the smart decision to incoporate ConnectWise® into your business operations, but now what? You will need a team of professional, seasoned experts to help you create and maintain a successful platform. But don’t just settle for the employee who says they can “figure it out”, make sure you are set up for success with a highly trained ConnectWise® Consultant like FocusPlanit. FocusPlanit is the industry’s premier team of highly qualified ConnectWise experts who have dedicated years of their professional life implementing and optimizing this solution. Our hands-on experience working with hundreds of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as well as our vast knowledge of the industry, allows our team to provide the unique ability to advise and teach your organization far beyond just the basics.

Use your business systems to its fullest potential. We can partner with you to optimize your system and change it from an expense into your most valuable asset. Working with our dedicated team of consultants, we’ll look at your implementations to identify and streamline the gaps within your current processes.

FocusPlanit is one of the industry’s premier ConnectWise® Consultants serving the entire United States. Contact us today and let us be your partner in success. You can learn more about our offerings and team at https://focusplanit.com/.