business tips – The Sundance Company

October 22, 2014September 3, 2014 sundancecompany business information, The Sundance Company

Sales Lessons Learned From Golf

About The Sundance Company
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs throughout the Boise Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.5 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime locations in the Boise metropolitan area. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.

October 15, 2014September 3, 2014 sundancecompany business information, The Sundance Company

Planning A Corporate Event To Remember

Planning a great corporate event is time-consuming. Make your investment work for you by giving your attendees an event that inspires, motivates, and engages. Regardless of its size, any company can host a successful corporate event to promote its brand, motivate its employees, and attract new customers. For example, an online magazine may wish to boost its marketing efforts by throwing an event at a related venue. These sites can include a historic building or an industry-related location such as a classic car showroom or a tech museum. Additionally, your corporate event can reach a new level by highlighting a keynote speaker who can add value, expertise, and innovation to the attendees’ experience. While your imagination is the limit when choosing a theme, savvy planners take advantage of emerging trends to create a memorable and successful event.

Plan an Experience, Not Just a Meeting

With the exception of new hires fresh out of college, most professionals have attended at least one corporate event. Over the years, these meetings may have become predictable events with little new to offer its attendees. Even if the subject matter is new, its impact is muted when attendees spend the entire conference in a hotel ballroom, peering at a PowerPoint presentation while drinking coffee.

One tourism board in the U.K. reports that the country’s many historic structures are popular sites for corporate events. These include sweeping cathedrals and castles, lending an exotic sensibility to an unforgettable conference. Other memorable sites for team-building exercises include outdoor venues such as beaches, wildlife parks, and survival programs.

Hire a Compelling Guest Speaker

Regardless of your industry, a vibrant guest speaker can energize and engage your attendees. The ideal keynote speaker does not need to be an industry expert. Often, a speaker from outside your business sector can spark a reaction from the attendees in a way that an insider cannot. Professional speakers are able to make a variety of presentations that can motivate the audience, challenge their assumptions, and inspire them. For example, you may hire a speaker who can address adversity, conflict resolution, customer relations, and time management. Other relevant subject areas include persuasion, ethics and integrity, life balance, and mentoring.

Your industry may not relate to shrimp boats, but a talented speaker who is able to use life lessons from the movie, “Forrest Gump,” can bring a fresh perspective to the event. Likewise, an Air Force pilot who survived an ejection into the ocean can inspire an audience of telecommunications professionals with a narrative of persistence and resilience. The sky can be the limit in selecting a guest speaker who engages, inspires, and motivates your conference attendees.

If your schedule and budget allows, look for speakers who can offer one or more auxiliary presentations in addition to their keynote address. When your attendees connect with a speaker, an additional presentation on another day injects a sense of anticipation and continuity into the conference.

Break from Tradition

Holding a corporate event at a hotel or conference center may be an expensive proposition. Every aspect of the meeting might be costly, from coffee and meal service, wireless Internet, and a hefty gratuity. Many event planners mitigate the cost of a conference by selling sponsorships to related entities. These sponsorships typically result in a conference room full of banners or an attendee packet filled with colorful flyers trying to out-neon the others. A few innovative and effective sponsorship ideas that can attract the attendees’ attention include:

Event apps with sponsored splash pages, banner ads, or show schedules. Be sure you don’t overdo it and have sufficient bandwidth to handle the app traffic. Perhaps a company can sponsor a code that enables the user to access faster connections to improve their user experience.
Event sponsors can underwrite the cost of Wi-Fi service within the venue, placing their corporate logo on a handout with the login code as well as ensuring the logo appears on the login page. Sponsored connectivity services also reduce the planner’s budget, boosting attendance and making it more affordable.
Industries that require its professionals to maintain a polished appearance can include sponsorship of a portrait photographer and a makeup artist, giving attendees free head shots. These professional portraits add gravitas to professional profiles, website bios, and LinkedIn profiles.

Event planners can present bundled sponsorships, allowing the sponsors to maintain a continual and useful presence throughout the event. These opportunities include blogs, white papers, webcasts, a prominent place on the event’s website, and placement on video walls.

No longer are corporate events a week-long snooze-fest fueled by bad coffee and lit by hotel ballroom lighting. Make your event a memorable one with fresh, uncommon indoor and outdoor venues; a compelling guest speaker to add value and variety to the schedule; and corporate sponsorships that involve and engage your attendees. While some events are mandatory for many employees, optional events will perish or flourish depending on what you offer attendees in exchange for their investment of time and money.

The story was originally published in Small Biz Daily .

October 8, 2014September 3, 2014 sundancecompany business information, office productivity, office space tips, The Sundance Company

3 Simple Ways To Build Great Customer Relationships

Organizations with great customer relationships are able to grow their businesses without gimmicks, fee cuts or special treatment. You have to be good at what you do, of course, but having a truly successful business is based on one simple concept: trust.

With trust, you’ll have customers (or clients) for life. Without trust, you may as well pack up and go home.

Building trust takes time and a lot of hard work. But it’s entirely doable if you and your teamwork on three of your most important core competencies: service, consistency and transparency.

Great Service Matters
According to a Concerto Marketing Group and Research Now survey, when customers trust a brand, 83 percent will recommend a trusted company to others and 82 percent will continue to use that brand frequently. While hardly anyone talks about the time you went above and beyond for a customer, you’ll certainly hear from the disgruntled ones if you failed to make a deadline or delivered a product that didn’t do what you had promised.

Earning a customer’s trust starts with giving great service. How would you want to be treated if you were a customer? The reality is that service should come naturally, instead of being strategically planned. The more you plan for great service, the less time you’ll spend delivering it.

Sure, there will be times when you’ve tried your best and can’t seem to make any headway with a particular problem. But you want to strive for responsiveness, timeliness and exceeded expectations.

Consistency Breeds Harmony
Consistency goes hand in hand with providing great service. Internal expectations lead to external results.

From a business perspective, consistency applies to every aspect of what you do:

Your employees should provide equivalent levels of service.
Equipped with the tools they need, your sales team should answers questions the same way.
You should stay the course with your products and services, rather than constantly shifting gears to try new tactics or initiatives.
Create meaningful measurement to determine whether something is working. If it isn’t viable, you should have a plan in place to make changes.

Consistency puts your money where you mouth is within your organization. From a leadership perspective, consistent performance shows employees what you expect from them. For example, if you miss a meeting without a good reason, don’t be surprised if they do the same.

Transparency Is Clear
Transparency is another competency that should come naturally. Yet so many businesses have trouble coming to terms with what it really means.

Customers and clients are smart. They know when you’re being up front or when they are told a mistruth. If honesty is the best policy, they’ll appreciate and admire you more when you admit to a mistake, rather than playing games or even worse, avoiding the topic altogether.

Don’t try to hide or cover up your errors. Address the issue directly, explain how you will handle it and share what steps are being taken to prevent the errors from occurring in the future. To implement transparency effectively, lead by example. Your employees will also admire you more for your honesty.

Sealing the Deal
Maintaining solid business relationships does not mean your customers or clients have to like you. Everyone wants to be liked. But creating customers and clients for life is more about them trusting you to deliver on your promises. It takes effort, but in the end your hard work will pay off again and again, with repeat business, more referrals and personal peace of mind, knowing you met and exceeded your customers’ expectations.

The story was originally published in Small Business Center.

October 1, 2014September 3, 2014 sundancecompany business information, The Sundance Company

5 Ways To Put More Welleness Into The Workplace

In recent years, workplace design has centered on creating hip, collaborative spaces with more open offices and flexible space to promote innovation and evolution within the companies that operate there. But the next wave of workplace design is promoting something arguably even more important: employee wellness.

One of the ways designers are facilitating healthier environments in corporate office space is through the subtle but thoughtful use of active design, where trash cans are built in to places that require employees to walk, or the eating area is purposefully designed with a staircase to access it. Other wellness options may be more obvious, such as incorporating more natural light into a space, having windows that open, or a gym.

Here are five other ways that designers are changing office spaces to make room for important wellness-focused amenities:

Standing desks: “Sitting is the new smoking” and causes many long-term health related problems. In fact, according to a recent study by Ergotron, 67 percent of Americans hate sitting at work and 85 percent take breaks from sitting for symptom relief. Furthermore, 96 percent would be willing to stand more to improve their health or life expectancy. Adding standing and conference furniture throughout an office gives people the option to stand while continuing to work.
Outdoor space: Even in colder climates, it’s important to encourage employees to get some fresh air and go for a walk. In many suburban locations, corporate office parks are looking for ways to establish walking paths, which can be great for employees but also a means to brand or connect several buildings on a campus. Walking paths not only encourage exercise, but provide new venues to hold group brainstorms. Another option is incorporating patio space adjacent to ground-floor conference rooms, so that meetings can spill outside, while fostering collaboration, creativity and a more exciting office culture.
Showers: While gyms are a highly sought-after amenity, showers are even more important, especially in urban locations where employees may be likely to ride their bikes to work. Of course, having a place to safely store a bike is also key.
Wellness/Mother’s rooms: A special room for mothers to breast feed is not only a considerate amenity that may encourage a woman to return to work, but one that is more sanitary and comfortable than the typical backup option of pumping in bathrooms. In some states such as Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, Tennessee, and more, providing a proper place for women to breastfeed is becoming a requirement or strongly encouraged as a way to promote wellness not just for moms, but for their babies. Wellness rooms offer staff time and space to escape from the main office.
Green building materials: Transparency about the chemicals that comprise building materials takes wellness a step further. This site, Transparency, shows people what building products are made of and whether or not they are bad for humans, animals and the environment as a whole. Clients are then informed of alternatives so they can make conscious decisions for the future wellness of their workplace. This keeps wellness front of mind for people and their families who come to work every day in a healthy and safe environment.

As people become more concerned with their own wellness, it makes sense that the place people spend the majority of their day adjusts to promote a healthy lifestyle. Architects and designers are listening; they’re incorporating thoughtful amenities into the future workplace design so that we can all be healthier. Ultimately, a healthier workplace is happier and more productive which benefits both employees and employers.

The story was originally published in Work Design Magazine.

December 8, 2011December 5, 2011 sundancecompany Boise Commercial Real Estate Development, boise valley commercial real estate, office productivity, office space tips, The Sundance Company

Is Your Desk A Mess? Clearing Out The Clutter

Do you ever feel that life is getting on top of you? Do you get overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done? Do you waste hours searching frantically for important documents, lost keys, and other essential items? Unfortunately for a lot of us, the answer to these questions is yes.

Keeping your surroundings tidy and organized might sound like a chore, but it’s actually one of the best ways to obtain peace of mind and a calmer outlook on life and at work.

Schedule Some Time – Like everything else on your to-do list, clearing out the clutter will only get done if you schedule some time for it. Tasks like tidying, organizing and cleaning are incredibly easy to put off, because they’re rarely urgent until, of course, you lose that very important report, your charger, or your car keys. Try giving yourself a target of just half an hour of non-stop tidying each day for a week. You’ll be surprised just how much you can get through.

Concentrate On One Place – One big mistake when clearing out the clutter is to try to do a bit of everything at once. Focus on getting one place completely cleared and organized; this will give you an instant motivational boost.

Tackle Something Each Day – Keep up the momentum by doing some tidying each day. Even if you’re really short of time, you can manage ten minutes to clear out some clutter. Don’t dismiss electronic clutter as it can be just as time-and-energy draining as physical mess.

Don’t Undo Your Good Work – Once you’ve got things to a tidy state, it won’t require much effort to keep them that way. Make sure that you get yourself into good habits so that things stay automatically tidy. For most people, this means making sure that items get put back to their proper places after use and spending a little time each week doing any extra tidying.

About The Sundance Company
Established in 1976, The Sundance Company has the experience to help you with your commercial real estate needs in Boise, Meridian, Nampa, and the greater Treasure Valley. If your requirements include property management, leasing, real estate development, project planning, construction or space planning then look to us. The Sundance Company has more than 1.5 million square feet of office and industrial space available in prime Boise and Meridian locations. More information is available at www.sundanceco.com or 208.322.7300.