Save on Electricity, Celebrate March Madness, and More To-Dos for Print Managers in March-April

March 3-9

STORE
Get in touch with your electric utility. Many offer free energy audits, giving you more ideas on how to cut down on your electrical consumption. Some water utilities do the same.

March 10-16

MOTIVATION Cultivate happiness: Good feelings boost your immune system and reduce stress. Yes, we’re making a case for starting a March Madness store pool: The NCAA basketball tournament starts on Mar. 14.

March 17-23

TRAINING Hold a mini-conference right in your own office. Assign each staff person a topic for a 5- to 10-minute presentation. Extra team-building points if you make the event a potluck lunch!

March 24-30

SALES
Does your after-hours phone message simply state, “Sorry, we’re closed”? That’s what sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer calls “D’oh” service. If so, re-record it to direct customers to your website or even another number they can contact you on.

March 31-April 6

SHOWROOM
Just like at home, spring means chores. “As soon as it warms a bit, clean, clean, clean,” says a Wisconsin jeweler in our sister publication, INSTORE. “Time to clear the air, shampoo the carpets, wash the windows, spruce things up.”

STAFF Ask team members for their summer vacation requests.

April 7-13

OPERATIONS Create an employee suggestion box but add a twist: Staff have just 30 days to submit ideas to make your business and their working lives better.

April 14-20

CRM List all the people who referred customers over the past three months. Thank them with flowers. If it was a big sale, perhaps send a gift certificate to a local restaurant.

April 21-27

OPERATIONS
Do you have guidelines for handling complaints? If not, get busy. As much as possible, empower employees to make decisions.

SEO The notion of creating a sea of content in the form of a company blog that Google can’t ignore may seem daunting, but it’s actually not so hard. Start with the 100 questions customers ask on a daily basis and turn them into 100 blog posts, with those questions transformed into the titles. If you write two a week, that’s a whole year of fresh content you can use across all online and social channels.

April 23-29

MANAGEMENT
If your typical response to handling day-to-day affairs is, “Let me take care of this,” then try this experiment: For the next two weeks, free up two hours a day just to manage. Delegate some admin work, drop less important meetings and spend the extra time giving more guidance to your team. In the end, you are likely to find that the extra productivity far outweighs your “lost” hours.