Meetings Come and Go... Nonstop

Whoaaaaa HEY now!! That simple, poorly structured sentence is an example of the amount of enthusiasm and passion that can be put into a business when things click together for the owners and management. One successful venture that has encouraged our management team at Signs by Tomorrow to say, "HEY now!!" is the ability to collaborate online with other franchisees. Gotomeeting.com has been our go to hosting platform for a couple of reasons, most notably it's ease of use.

Signs by Tomorrow itself is a national franchise comprised of 164 independently owned and operated entities. However, Connecticut is currently all mine for the taking as we are the only SBT to have the rights to this territory and grants us far greater zip codes than franchisees are traditionally contracted to. Doesn't that sound great? Obviously. Because it is!

However, there are pros and cons to every situation. The con here is that although we have this entire state as our marketable territory, we feel as though the support we receive from other franchisees and headquarters (Baltimore, MD), can be lacking. I can only imageine how the support system was in the first two decades this franchise operated before technology developed to bring long distance relationships together. Online meetings have been an absolute tremendous asset to our operations and profitability over the past two years and is something I would highly encourage other sole proprietors to entertain if they are capable of finding an outside support system. Any trouble shooting we have is immediately solved by a counterpart who can walk us through the steps on either their own machines or techniques to help us solve a problem. Furthermore, any computer glitches we have or networking problems can be immediately solved as a more knowledgeable technician can run our desktop remotely to completely immerse themselves into our system to identify what the problem may be.

 Hands down, without a service for online collaboration, our business would not be experiencing the growth that we have been. We would have let too many customers down had we not had the opportunity to access outside support regardless of where they may be in the nation. In the future, our headquarters has announced online tutorials and webinars that will be phased into the second half of 2011 to act as not only technical advice, but as emotional stimulators to drive persistence and determination. HEY now!! I love every minute of it. Technology is helping me carve out dreams and to get where I want to be. I just need to keep identifying where the next technological innovation can apply to me in the real world.