When It s Good for Busine to Get Personal by Ren Grajales

I love when I walk into my favorite diner and the waitress says, The usual? After all, this is an increasingly rare sort of relationship-especially with regard to professional services.

As in the case of my lunch order, it makes great sense for a business transaction-whether it's a sandwich or a service-to start with a face-to-face interaction. Take the partnerships you build with vendors, including those that provide storage, shredding and other records management services. If you're like most small business owners, that's a task you would love to let someone else take over, thank you very much. And if you're feeling buried in information in general, the right vendor can help you organize all of your records-paper and digital-so you don't have to go it alone.

Goodbye Paper, Hello Space and Productivity

A recent study reports that 91 percent of business professionals have never met their regular contractors and customers. Here are five worthwhile reasons to get on a first-name basis with a records management vendor:

Those stacks of paper will make you crazy. With all the other tasks you have to complete to keep your business running, piles of paper can accumulate fast. Use your office space more effectively by getting rid of all those boxes.

Commercial real estate costs more per square foot than storage space. Warehousing all your documents in your office is like paying Malibu beachfront prices for a house in Des Moines.

The average employee spends 25 percent of the workweek filing, copying, indexing and retrieving documents. An expert partner will index your records and retrieve them quickly, without wasting your employees' time.

You'll be better prepared for bad news. Experts can save your team valuable search time, but a team of professionals can also help you respond to a legal matter or audit by helping you gather critical information quickly. A records management expert with compliance knowledge can also help you avoid saving too much, so you know what to keep-and what to pitch.

Security is more important than ever. Documents that aren't lying on your desk or copy machine can't be stolen.

Companies spend millions trying to get consumers to treat their brands like living, breathing human beings. But let's face it: The personal relationship is what they all want to mimic. When you have someone coming into your office every week-even if it's just to whisk away a bunch of paper-you get to know that person beyond the corporate brand. And that feels good-almost as good as a shop owner who knows you don't like mayo on your BLT.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/service-lines/small-business/when-i...
	See more stories from ironmountain

Most recent headlines