You should always have your questions prepared in advance of the interview and don't feel uncomfortable taking notes during the process. This will help you to remember key qualities about each candidate.Remember to always verify a prospective employee's references and past work experience before extending an offer. Also, if you will be allowing the employee use of a company car you should also verify that they have a clean driving record.Having Well Trained Customer Service StaffWhat can make or break a business is the customer service staff. Large companies often have at least two or three customer service staff available to handle problems or complaints, especially if the company sells a product of some type. As a party rental business, you may not need this, since you will be a smaller scale operation. In some cases, you may be only a one, two, or three person team running the business. But even if you do have a small company, you should still be well trained in handling customer’s complaints. What if you have an event, but either during the event, or shortly after you get a call from the client, stating something the client did not like that happened during the event. How are you going to handle that? If you take the call, you need to know good customer service skills so you can deal with it, or you may lose a customer for life. If you do not take the call, whoever does, should know how to handle such issues, or you will find yourself losing business. It doesn’t take much to upset a client. So you better be on your best behavior before, during, and after the event. It would be beneficial to make sure you and all your staff, as well as any independent contractors, know how to handle customer service issues. Many businesses have failed and closed their doors because they had untrained customer service staff. The staff did the best they could, they just weren’t trained properly. If you have to, take a night school course in customer service training so you know how to handle problems. You can save your business if you know how to talk to an irate customer. This cannot be overemphasized enough. Do not take customer service lightly. It can make or break your business quickly. Have you ever heard the expression that “bad news travels like wildfire and good news travels slow”? This is true in most cases. Therefore, if you want a business that lasts for years, it would be most advisable for you to employ thoroughly trained people with great customer service skills. When you hire independent contractors, make sure to ask if they have been trained in customer service, or what they’re customer service skills are. If you are in doubt, test them and see their response. Then you’ll know. Finding and Dealing with an AccountantAs a small business owner you may not want to get involved in doing the accounting work. Accounting work takes time. It also takes a lot of thinking and math. If you are not good at math, you may not be good at accounting. If you are great at math and have worked as a bookkeeper before, you may be fine doing your own books, but not everyone has that ability.
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