Say Breeze

What is it your customers want from your business? It’s a seemingly simple question, is it not? But it sure is an important one. Answer it right and you get to pass Go and collect $200, but answer it wrong and you ain’t going nowhere.

Let me suggest that it is those companies who answer this vital question most correctly who usually end up being the most successful. After all, it is the job of any business to serve the market. The better you analyze it and do that, the better your chances of success.

Let me give you an example: Our friends here at Concur Breeze recently launched a mobile app of their popular expense accounting program. It is a very cool tool. With it, mobile employees can import expense data, categorize expenses, create expense reports, and even submit those reports.

In case you have not heard (or the trend has not yet hit your area) food carts and food trucks are all the rage right now.

Throughout Los Angeles for example, food trucks serving high cuisine at low prices continue to explode in popularity. Kogi Korean BBQ alone has four trucks that swarm the city: Serving incredible tacos at $2 a pop, these restaurants-on-wheels typically generate lines that last 45 minutes or more and the trucks rake in millions annually.

Welcome guest blogger, Andrew Bartolini, Managing Partner & Chief Research Officer of Ardent Partners and Publisher of CPO Rising:

I’ll start with an apology to Concur and the readers of this blog for the long delay since my last discussion about my experience with Concur Breeze as a first-time user and new SMB-owner. They say you should never write a check that you can’t cash and while that is something I am loathe to do, the first few months as the owner of a small business and publisher of a large media site have served as a real eye-opener for all of the trade-offs that entrepreneurs must continually make to ensure the greatest return on their invested resources. Anyway, I’m back now to share my thoughts and experience as I create my first Expense Report (“ER”) in Concur Breeze.

In my last post, I had just registered for the 60-day free trial Breeze, set-up the system and account, and added three credit cards to the system in less than 25 minutes. Unfortunately, since my last post, the 60-day free trial period had ended. Fortunately, Concur established a new policy that allows the first two employees of any enterprise to use Breeze for free. At $8 a month per user, I do not consider Breeze to be a significant investment for my business and the fee was something I had planned to pay; but I won’t complain. I’m the only employee who needs this service now, so the free and “risk-free” nature of this ER exercise continues… and I keep a few more dollars in my pocket.

While the days remain long and hot, we all know that fall is just around the corner. For the small business person, that is not insignificant. Aside from all of the spending that goes with kids heading back to school, fall is also the time when people’s attention turns back to work.

Plans are made, budgets are solidified, change is in the air.

So the question is, will your business be ready? If indeed it is true that people and businesses spend more in the fall (it is and they do), then it behooves you to get on the ball now. Here’s how:

Concur Breeze simplifies the expense reporting process for small businesses, like yours. Here’s a new client case study that demonstrates how one company uses Concur Breeze to help them increase efficiency, save time and go paperless.

ChartWise Medical Systems, Inc. was founded on a mission to simplify and improve the clinical documentation process for hospitals. The company's products help ensure efficiency and accuracy, making it no surprise that they wanted to ensure the same qualities in its expense reporting process. "Moving to an automated process was a given," says Mary Cooper, ChartWise's executive vice president. "The challenge was finding an affordable solution for our small but growing company." Enter Concur® Breeze.

I read not long ago that Chris Haney passed away and it made me sad. You probably don’t know the name, but you definitely know his invention. I wrote about Chris several years ago in my book The Big Idea. He was a great entrepreneur.

Back in the late 70s, Haney and his pal Scott Abbot were out of work journalists who loved to play Scrabble. One day they went to play and saw that they were missing a letter tile. On their way to the toy store to buy a new set they realized that they had bought a lot of Scrabble games over the years. So right then and there they decided to create a new board game.

It was an audacious idea as no one had done that in almost 50 years; Scrabble and Monopoly were about it at the time. Given that they were broke and had never started a business before, Haney and Abbot’s plan was all the more incredible.

About a year ago I wrote a column for USA TODAY in which I advised small business owners to “not tweet.” My thinking was that spending a lot of time on Twitter was not the best use of your marketing efforts.

Blasphemy, I know.

A few years ago I learned one of the great secrets to small business success. I have always thought that business success comes from a variety of factors – passion, experience, smarts, savvy marketing, the willingness to adopt new technology, great service, emotional intelligence, and luck, to name a few.

But I never guessed that the sort of boss you are turns out to be a key, critical factor in determining your entrepreneurial success.

First, let’s get it out of the way that I am no sales guru. Of course, like you, I have done my share of sales over the years; all small business people have. Whether it is closing the deal or getting a client to finally pay up, selling is a large part of what we do.

And yet, although I am not the sales expert, I have been fortunate enough to get to meet and speak with some of the best, and those folks amaze me. Whether it is Tom Hopkins or Zig Ziglar or Jeffrey Gitomer, the top sales professionals all seem to have a few things in common:

We recently announced that mobile functionality is now available for Concur Breeze users. Want to learn more? Watch this brief video and see Mark, a SMB owner and Concur Breeze user, as he highlights key features of the new mobile application.