“In conjunction with our 25^th anniversary, we wanted to give away something to the business community,” stated owner Jim Caughorn. “It’s an opportunity for somebody to help promote their business through a vehicle wrap.”

In order to get maximum exposure, Caughorn chose to run the contest through social media and asked the Efficience team, led by Creative Director Tori Rose, to head it up.

“In addition to increasing the sheer number of people who interact with your brand, a contest provides a means to deepen the connection, as well,” said Rose. “A user-generated content (UGC) promotion, such as a photo or video contest, is a great way to do just that. UGC contests tap in to the human drive to compete, and they provide an opportunity for everyone to experience their 15 minutes of fame. Most importantly, when participants upload their personal content (e.g., a photo or story) to your promotion, they are naturally invested in your brand.”

The Wrap My Ride contest was run through Graphic Creations’ Facebook page, asking participants to submit either a picture or video showing their ride and telling why it needed a wrap.  The top three entries with the highest number of votes were judged by Graphic Creations.

“We have received more business because of the campaign,” said Caughorn. “Many of the clients that entered were still interested in a wrap or other services that we offer. It was great exposure for our existing customer as well as new prospective clients.

“The team at Efficience was extremely helpful and responsive,” he continued. “I was all over the place on what I wanted to accomplish and they did a great job keep us on task and making sure we stayed on message. There were instrumental in helping promote the event as well.”

For more information on how your business can benefit from contest promotions, please contact Tori Rose, Creative Director at Efficience, 865.824.9379, x. 33 or tori@efficience.us.

Beginning May 1, 2013, you have the opportunity to upload your own rap video to Facebook, telling the world why your company deserves to win a FREE mobile app, designed by Efficience!

Whether you use it to communicate with potential customers or to manage your existing vendors, almost any business – large or small – can benefit from having a mobile application built for its company.

How can you use a mobile app in your business?

• Target local customers and provide special offers
• Showcase products and services
• Set reminders for your customers in their mobile calendars

A recent survey by mobile business card provider, Vizibility concluded that 67% of consumers say they are more likely to buy from a business with a mobile-friendly site. They also found that companies that don’t have a mobile-friendly site drive 61% of their mobile traffic to competitors.

If you can’t afford to lose business due to your lack of app, then why not rap for your app?  Get creative, get fresh, but most importantly, get moving. This contest runs through May 31, 2013. The top three contestants with the most votes will be entered into the finals and then voted on by the staff at Efficience.

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What this means is, when you view a website on your computer, you see the site as normal. If the website is responsive, when you shrink your browser, the content resizes to fit it. When you bring it up on your tablet or mobile device, the website once again resizes to fit, but without losing the integrity and aesthetics of the site (you don’t have to zoom in to read it).

As people move from viewing the majority of their content on PCs, the shift to mobile is occurring at lightning speed. The tablet market sales are expected to exceed 100 million this year alone, while sales in smartphones are projected to exceed 850 million, according to Digitimes. Your customers are viewing your website on the go, making mobile design top priority.

Is your website easy for your customers to access – from all devices? levitra uk

“Everywhere we looked, we saw iPhones in our customers’ hands,” McClellan said. He saw a mobile strategy with an app as a way to drastically reduce expenses, but also provide speed and efficiency with his customers. With more than 10 million smart phones sold in the United States by AT&T just in the last quarter, his strategy was right on target.

“I had been reading since 2010 about the importance of businesses, including small businesses, having a mobile strategy,” McClellan stated. “And a few sources felt that if you did not have a mobile strategy by fourth quarter 2012, you would be left behind.”

McClellan set up a meeting with the team at Efficience and they got to work. He wanted to accomplish four things with the app: communicate events with the ability to import into the customer’s iPhone calendar; notify customers of new arrivals; include a dossier to store sizing information for the customer’s family and friends; and to include a resource with helpful advice on the fly, such as “How to Tie a Bowtie,” “How to Polish a Shoe,” or “The Essential Rules of Black Tie,” among other topics.

“I have been very, very pleased with our experience with Efficience, “McClellan stated.  “Their staff from top to bottom is well versed in mobile media and development.  The personal service and quick response were better than expected.  M. S. McClellan is very proud of the app that has been created and we give a lot of the credit to Efficience.”

To date, the app has been installed on about 300 smart phones.  McClellan hasn’t had a lot of critique, but has plans to implement some suggestions from customers. He has had a few customers compliment them for being ahead of the curve and praise the app as “useful.”

Overall, McClellan hopes to get their app on as many of their customer’s phones as possible, regardless of age, so that they may communicate directly with patrons on a consistent basis. He hopes with the success of the app, to allow M. S. McClellan to drastically reduce its printing and mailing costs, relying instead on their app as the preferred mode of communication with the customer.

Efficience is a technology solutions provider headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee. With expertise in web design, e-commerce, mobile platforms and social media apps, Efficience has delivered more than 200+ software projects to clients like, Petsafe, University of Tennessee, The District in Bearden, Coca-Cola, H.T. Hackney, DenTek, Circlespring and Kelsan. Our goal is to provide cutting edge technology and development services that will help our clients’ businesses grow and achieve profitability.

For more information, please contact Tori Rose, Creative Director at Efficience, 865.824.9379 x. 33 or tori@efficience.us. viagra

Our coach, Phil Kristianson, incorporated some adjustments and tools worth sharing.  One, the Wheel of Life, allows you to look at the key areas of your life and rate them by how satisfied you are with that area.  These include family, significant other, health, career, finances, relationships, spirituality, and adventure or fun. See the form here and print it out and try it for yourself.

When you fill this out, you see the areas where you are lacking fulfillment in life and where you are fulfilled.   With that awareness and some introspection, you can create goals based around the areas you should be focusing on in order to better your life.  If you go around the circle and find it to be up and down like a roller coaster, your life may not be as balanced as you may optimally like.  Thus, an effort can be made to balance it out.

These types of exercises help us to understand one another in the forum.  We get to know each other and our areas of strength or weakness, so we can share experiences and changes to help one another in those areas.  This is a key aspect of forum:  to get help and see if you are being real with where you are and how you are getting where you are going.

How balanced are the areas of your life?  Do you have a peer or peer group helping you strive to improve?

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Scalability allows you to take something you have already built and duplicate it over and over. It is a key ingredient in business. With the framework we have built, we can add a custom cover to create a product more quickly and with less cost than if we rebuilt one each time from scratch. This is a powerful aspect you get from software.

The healthcare vertical is still being explored, and we are gathering information to discover what we want to do to be a clipper ship and follow the money in that space. We will talk to different companies and ask questions to find their hot spots. With the mobile app platform, we will approach marketing firms about providing this platform for them, allowing them to reduce cost and speed up the process, which will in turn benefit their clients.

This will introduce another level of salability. We can develop relationships with one business at a time, build a mobile app for them, and move on to the next one. With the marketing companies, we can build one relationship with a marketing firm, and they could send us one, two, five, or ten apps to build. Creating value for others pays off with more business and, with the right execution, profits.

How scalable is your business and what are the possibilities of making it scalable to increase your opportunities?

Well that is exactly what happened with Wal-Mart. Their Saturday morning meetings created a lead time in the industry and catapulted Wal-Mart up to one of the highest grossing companies in the world. You might say, “Excuse me, a meeting did that?” Well, in Verne Harnish’s book “The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time,” Hank Gilman makes that case.

It began back in the beginning when Sam Walton started this Saturday morning meetings in his first store in Bentonville, AR. He held these meetings to gather all of his people in one place to figure out what was selling and what was not. He would look at different metrics and determine what needed to be changed based on what had happened over the previous week. Then, with the managers brainstorming, they would make changes, put items on sale that needed to go, and move things around to get noticed. After this, they immediately went out and implemented these ideas to take advantage of the strong weekend activity.

Stay ahead of the competition. This was key. By simply staying days ahead, they eventually zoomed past the industry leaders, such as Sears and Kmart. When interviewed, Walton’s friend and successor David Glass explained that a big accomplishment of the Saturday meetings was to collect and distribute information to all of those in the company, so it could be shared. Sam felt that everyone should work together as partners and should know what was going on.

This meeting allowed Wal-Mart’s people to gather and discuss ideas, and they could have all the corrections in place by noon on Saturday. This would put Wal-Mart ten days ahead of the likes of Kmart and Sears. How did the meetings work? The employees would share their best ideas and concepts. The idea of a Wal-Mart greeter came from this. Some executives would show best practices videos. To top it off, if the meetings were getting stale, they would bring in guest speakers like Bill Clinton, Adam Sandler, and Oprah Winfrey.

What are you doing in your meetings to stay just ahead of the competition and share information with your employees? How are you making them feel like partners? And yes, even the best of us can have stale meetings, so what are you doing to make sure they are interesting?

In the book “Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success,” Segall explains how simplicity was the connecting theme between all the great things they did with hardware, software, strategy, and other areas, thus making them the most valuable company on the planet. Segall’s observations are particularly intriguing because he worked at an ad agency as creative director for companies like IBM, Intel, and Dell as well as with Steve Jobs’ other company NeXT.

I have been saying this for a while now about the things we do and the products we create, so my interest was piqued. It was very clear that we had not gone to the extremes discussed in this book. I would like to thank my friend Paul Sponcia, a fellow entrepreneur in technology, for sending me this book. He knew it would resonate with me.

Segall says, “Whether you’re a person, dog, fish, or ameba, you will respond more positivity to the simpler solution – even if it isn’t a conscious response.” Knowing, embracing, and leveraging this as a business person, especially one creating the new web and mobile apps, will achieve greater success than those that do not.

Segall gives several examples, including limiting the number of people in a meeting to the few that really need to be there. More people create more complexity. When Jobs came back to Apple, they had about 30 products, and he simplified it down to 4. The iPhone has only one button because Jobs wanted complete simplicity. He rejected many versions before he got to the one button design.

The power of simple not only made amazing products, it became a key value at Apple. I see the power of simple and understand better why the opposing force of complexity gets in the way. I will be more relentless going forward with making simplicity a mantra of what we do.

What are you doing to incorporate simplicity in your business as well as other areas of your life?

Well, my simple answer is to not fret too much because mistakes are going to continue to happen. We are all human. The more introspective answer is to learn from the mistakes and avoid making them again. It seems that I get the angriest when I realize that I have made a mistake for the second or even the third time (geez where is a wall I can beat my head against)! I try to ask what caused the mistake and then put a process or approach in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again. If the mistake happens again, I realize that I didn’t take the time to follow up on what I wanted to have in place to start with (oh boy, another mistake)!

One of the mistakes I’ve realized over the past couple of years is not being as focused in a specific niche or vertical within the software space. I have made the excuse that the product side of our business, which is more of the swinging for the fences approach with a lot of strike outs, would be our grand plan. But it is not stable and consistent so we need to have a side that produces cash flow and consistency. That was supposed to be the development of custom software for various businesses. The custom software was ad hock with no real focus and also had a lot of inconsistency. This was not working and for good reason, so it had to change.

We have made changes in our firm to have a specific focus. We have hired and plan around that focus and create an environment of synergy around the health care space. I wrote a blog a while back on the clipper ship strategy, which discusses being flexible and going where the money is, and that is definitely in healthcare. We will tighten this strategy and create a much better outcome and pipeline for our company.

This is one mistake that has been painful, and I will energize us to move forward in a new way. Again, Happy New Year and here is to a making it the best year yet as you and I recover from our previous mistakes! levitra uk

Last week, we asked the question “What are you going to do to ensure you have more energy next year than you did this year?” Sailing around those islands is one of those things that helps create energy for working in the world of the entrepreneur. Vacation and escape is not about physical rest. It is about allowing our minds to rest from all the things spinning around in there that is related to the job we do and how we are doing it.

To me, vacation is also about expanding the mind in some way that opens it up to new ideas and thinking to allow me to make better decisions in running a company. Isn’t that the most important thing we do as entrepreneurs . . . make decisions? It is the decisions we make to start this, stop that, keep something going, put more resources into a project, improve a process, and having the right people. Therefore, if our brains are all gummed up with gunk from not letting it go and recharging, we don’t seem to do as well in the decision department.

The sunsets, the sunrises, the water and its vastness, the landscape of the islands, the beautiful beaches, so many more stars to ponder over, and the different people to meet open our minds to the possibilities and pump up our energy. Degunking and staying disconnected from my business (phone mostly was roaming) and the news of the world (what fiscal cliff?) allowed me come back more mentally energized.

In “The Power of Full Engagement,” Tony Schwartz discusses how fully engaged energy, not time, is our most precious resource. He says “Every one of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors has an energy consequence, for better or worse. The ultimate measure of our lives is not how much time we spend on the planet but rather how much energy we invest in the time we have.” His key premise affirms that the skillful management of energy determines performance, health, and happiness.

What are you doing to make sure you are fully energized to take on all that your business throws at you?