Keeping communication consistent across departments is important when your shop is growing. Everyone needs to know what needs to know what has been done and what’s next for each job.

Historically, this task can fall upon 1-2 people but to increase efficiency, you want everyone on the same page.

Printavo helps shops around the world to increase communication in a few ways.

1. Statuses – Each order will belong to a color-coded status. This status defines where the job is in your workflow. Statuses help keep a job moving through a repeatable process. You’re able to customize the statuses to match your exact workflow too.

2. Tasks – Assign tasks to individual users along with a due date. Tasks help keep track of items that may come out of order. If you

3. Unlimited users – Printavo’s Standard and Premium plans allow you to have unlimited users. Because Printavo is also in the cloud, you can allow these users to be anywhere as long as they have an internet connection. Shops using Printavo will have tablets attached to a press, big screen TVs on the production floor, and outside sales reps closing deals.

Give Printavo a try today to help keep your shop organized!

An untrained employee is likely to be unhappy due to confusion. They will underperform, and you will be frustrated because they’re not doing what you want. Your new hire won’t stay long and you’ll have to spend time searching for another, which will cost you time and money.

Quality of work delivered will be less than expected. Don’t believe the new hire’s deliverables will be exactly what you asked for since you didn’t take the time to teach them properly. Not only that, you’re going to have to do most of their tasks for them over again, which will, again, cost you time and money.

Your customers are your lifeblood, and new hire mistakes will create unhappy customers.

Here’s how we onboarding our new hires at Printavo to give you some ideas!

Getting started with a reputable HR provider early on will save you many headaches down the road. Dealing with new employee documentation, benefits, taxes, offer letters, payroll, hourly, contractor, and full-time employees will drive you up a wall!

At Printavo, when we first started hiring employees, we wanted to make sure everything was very clear for our team members. When was payday, how to enroll in benefits, etc needed to all be written clearly and easily comprehensible for everyone.

In addition, you have enough on your plate and don’t need HR issues added onto this.

We did a lot of research when finding an HR/payroll provider that was simple to use and had a support team to help us.

We looked into using our accountant, ADP, ZenPayroll, Gusto, Intuit, and more.

After many trials, phone calls, and demos, we decided on Gusto. Gusto met our needs in the following ways:

1. Onboarding new hires – They can allow you to create new-hire documents for signing.

2. Support – Their live chat and email support has been amazing. They do have a phone number although we haven’t needed to call it.

3. Data – We can pull all types of reports, find old paystubs and connect Gusto with other services for reimbursements, detailed accounting, and time-tracking.

4. Benefits – When we started to offer healthcare to our team, setting this up was unbelievably simple and required little work. They can handle 401k, transit benefits and more.

We’re not compensated by Gusto to write this but truly feel it can help shops grow and focus on printing.

Any questions? Drop a comment below!

Hiring the right people is the single most important job you have as a shop owner. As the business grows, your team is the most important asset of the company. It’s what you should be spending a significant time on in regards to hiring, training, 1-on-1’s, improvements and more.

Hiring can be tricky as the goal is to fully vet candidates to make the right choice. Candidates may not tell the full truth, exaggerate responsibilities or not just be the right cultural fit for your shop.

If you hunt for candidates, phone interview 20 people, and have 3 in-person interviews, that can add up to 50+ hours of work. Multiple that by what you value your time at hourly and it adds up quickly. Let alone the training for this new candidate, plus what if they don’t end up working out and you start over?

Point being, we want to get as many new-hire decisions right from the getgo.

At Printavo, we’ve found a neat trick that helps us vet candidates by using a 3rd party interviewer.

We have found that having someone external, with interviewing experience, helps the candidate open up more. They don’t feel as up-tight as talking to the business owner and reveal a lot more about their personality.

We’ve been able to use this to decline candidates and avoid costly hiring mistakes.

At Printavo, we use Balance HR Solutions (http://bhrspartners.com) to interview all of our candidates. They will ask questions such as:

– Salary expectations

– Missing resume information

– Stumping experience questions

– Dive deep into goals

Plus they’ll deliver a summary of their opinions and anything odd that may have come up. They bill us hourly for the time and we can talk through candidates’ summaries on the phone.

Of course, there are many people with experience interviewing. The point is to have someone outside the company talk to the candidate and get a different feel for their fit.

Have any other tips you use? Leave a comment!

George Wojciechowski, Co-Founder of ShipBob has over 150 employees and $20+ million in funding. ShipBob has grown to become a leading fulfillment partner for e-commerce businesses. George has helped to grow ShipBob into a nationwide business and will be delivering best practices for everyone to utilize.

PrintHustlers Conf 2018 is the second annual conference for the decorated apparel industry organized by Printavo. This conference will provide a unique opportunity to grow, develop, learn new ways to expand your business and increase profitability! Become exposed to industry leaders, thought-provoking tips and tricks and an abundance of resources to assist shops with running a viable business.