Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?

By Ian M. Marlow
August 1, 2016

Everyone uses a mobile phone or a tablet these days. You see it everywhere—people using their mobile devices while walking down the street, eating in a fancy restaurant, even in an important work meeting. In fact, studies show that mobile usage accounts for about 65 percent of digital media time.

Google has changed their algorithm, meaning that if your site isn’t mobile friendly, it may leave you off of searches. That means when people are searching for what you do, if they can’t see your site clearly on their mobile devices, they won’t see you at all.

What’s the difference? Why doesn’t your site display the same way on a mobile device as a desktop?
Many of the common reasons why a website isn’t mobile-friendly is because:

• The content is too wide: This means that users need to scroll side-to-side to read the page.
• The text too small: Readers will have to zoom in to see the content, and then move around too much to read from line to line. They won’t want to be bothered to do all that.
• The links too close together: If your links are too close together, they will be too hard to tap on. Again, readers won’t bother. They will go to another site.

So how can you check this out?

Enter your website’s URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and it will let you know if your site meets the requirements of a mobile friendly site. If the website you entered passes, Google will display a green banner indicating the website is mobile-friendly. If the website does not pass, Google will let you know the page is not mobile-friendly and give some reasons why.

Here are some things you can do to make your site mobile-friendly:

• The first thing you should do is check with your web developer. That person/company should be fully versed in how to make your site mobile friendly.
• Your font size and button sizes matter mobile devices. Font size should be at least 14px. While it seems big, it will be easier for users to read on a mobile device. Make your buttons bigger too. This will cut back on the chance that the user hit the wrong button.
• Test, test, and test some more. Once you have gotten your site mobile friendly, test it on an iPhone, an Android, a Windows phone, and different tablets. You want to be sure everyone who comes to your site on a mobile device will be able to see it clearly.

If you want to know more about how to get your site up to Google standards, contact FITECH today at (212) 223-TECH (8324), email info@fitechllc.com or visit www.fitechllc.com. You can also find us on these social media outlets: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.

Fitech Founder Talks Facebook

By Ian M. Marlow
May 20, 2016

Fitech founder Ian Marlow was a guest on Unfiltered with Dennis Michael Lynch to discuss allegations that Facebook is intentionally preventing conservative topics from trending on the social media site. Check out the whole interview here.

http://www.newsmaxtv.com/shows/unfiltered/archive/vid/JtZjBtMzE6XqrdhVEitqGEIj34YJ57HU/

Why You Need to Automate Your Payables

By Ian M. Marlow
May 8, 2016

Long gone are the days of huge, dusty accounting ledgers where an employee tediously entered credits, debits, bills received, payments received, payments made, in tiny columns, with red ink and black ink and parentheses around negative numbers. Even though that type of system is completely antiquated, there are still companies that keep more paper records than they need to. It’s time to automate Here’s why:

1. Automating your AP process eliminates a great deal of human error. When your entire system, from process through payment, is managed online, there are fewer ways that your employees can make a mistake, transpose a number, or otherwise make something go wrong in the system.
2. Automating your payables saves time. When you can get your daily AP tasks done with a few keystrokes rather than shuffling through piles of papers each day, you’ll have more time for other tasks that will help your business grow and prosper. Automation also gives you immediate access to any information you may need for any aspect of your system, from purchase orders to invoices to comprehensive reports.
3. Automating your AP system saves money. With an online AP system, the time you save will also result in a savings of dollars. Your employees won’t spend as much time doing the labor intensive tasks associated with AP, so they can work on other tasks. In addition, an automated system to pay your bills will save you the money that you may have had to pay in late fees for past due payments.
4. An automated payable system gives you access to endless information. With an automated payables system, you can get access a variety of reports, including electronic invoices and data; budget forecast reports; purchase order and invoice tracking. Any and all information you may need is right at your fingertips.
5. Automation gives you instant access to your AP information, no matter where you are. Even if you are out of the office, mobile accessibility will allow you to see what’s going on with your accounting system.
6. Automating your system protects you from risks. With a paper system, if your office gets destroyed by fire or flood, all your records are gone. With automated payables, that would be one less thing to worry about. In addition, an automated payable system greatly reduces the risk for fraud. You can have fraud detection built into your system so you’ll be instantly alerted to a duplicate request for payment.

Overall, automated payables are far superior to paper systems. It’s time to explore an automated system for your company.

If you have any questions about automated payables , contact FITECH today at (212) 223-TECH (8324), email info@fitechllc.com or visit www.fitechllc.com. You can also find us on these social media outlets: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.

Choosing a Customer Relationship Management System for Your Real Estate Company

By Ian M. Marlow
May 18, 2015

Customer relationships are the backbone of building a stable, profitable real estate business. Customer relationship management, or CRM, represents a broad array of software products designed to get and follow up on leads, measure sales, and manage the myriad touch points related to a deal. In real estate, CRM systems are used by owners and/or property managers and real estate brokers.

In short, a CRM system enables your sales and management teams to communicate with each other and with tenants, external partners, or landlords … so that “customer” might not be an actual buyer/tenant—it could be another organization or team you are partnering with on a deal. The information gleaned from the reports—which pull together data across multiple sources—helps drive smarter business decisions and marketing efforts.

Six factors to consider for a real estate CRM system:

1. Company size/user base. The first issue to address is whether you want a local, self-hosted application or a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. This “local or global” decision is based on the number of users, their locations and how and where they will access your data, as well as budget. A very small real estate office might do fine with a combination of software such as Excel, ACT! Pro (database) and Outlook. Larger offices with multiple assets or a large number of tenants, landlords or partners to deal with need a fully-integrated and customized customer relationship management system.

2. Scalability of system. Multiple users or offices, multiple products and the need to manage many transactions require a higher level of tracking and more expansive reporting, which a CRM system will do. Make sure the system you select can grow with your company.

3. Define the data to capture. Who is conducting your sales transactions and how is that process managed? What is the timeline from inquiry to sale? A custom-designed CRM product will track key information and help manage the entire sales process, from the pitch to the close. Track statistics and activity for prospects, pull accurate reports on the sales cycle, have automatic ticklers tied into each prospect’s needs—gather all the data that leads to a sales person reaching out when the right property becomes available.

4. Define the reporting you need. What types of reports are needed and how frequently will you run them depends on your particular business model. A fully- integrated database system can yield a variety of statistics depending on your business: tenants, prospects, lease expirations; prospective property management opportunities and contract expirations—the list goes on. If your organization cross-sells products/services (leasing and property management, financial services, corporate services), this adds another layer of reporting.

5. CRM tracks opportunities. Analyzing the data around various sales opportunities provides insights into why your team executed a sale or failed to do so, which leads are paying off and which referral source is providing higher quality leads. Looking at pre-sale and post-sale data helps you determine which relationships are adding to your bottom line and how those deals happen. All pertinent criteria should be in the CRM, and mining that information will guide your sales process and your marketing.

6. CRM measures your sales team’s effectiveness. Digging into your CRM system’s data can tell you why there is more activity around one property and not another or help figure out why one is taking longer or shorter to close. This also helps determine the types of properties your brokers should work on, who should work on your deals and who you should you be building relationships with.

Implementing a tailored customer relationship management system is like adding an advisor to your team. You’ll get actionable insights from reports; track activity across multiple locations, revenue centers and people, and see more clearly the potential of forming more cohesive relationships with external partners based on the data. When used correctly, your customer relationship management system will drive sales, improve processes and help your organization make smarter business decisions.

The Technology Resource You Have Always Searched For But Never Found

By Ian M. Marlow
February 7, 2014

What is technology? How do you define technology? Does it only include computers, applications and the specific functions those items provide? We don’t think so. We are engineers. We engineer simple solutions (for the users) to complex problems. How is that done? It happens with the intersection of people, process and technology.

I had an engineering professor in my first year at college ask the following question and rhetorically answer it immediately: “What’s the difference between a mathematician and an engineer? The mathematician will tell you the answer is five. The engineer will tell you how he got five.”

IT solutions, accounting systems, industry specific applications. They all mean nothing if not designed to the organization’s need; they do nothing if users don’t actually use them, and they have bad data if users are not trained. That makes every product and its implementation an engineering question. We have to ask what result does the business need and implement the system and the use of that system to match those requirements.

Have you ever spent 10 years thinking about a project, but never implemented it because coming up with the approach was too difficult or just too time consuming? Have you ever green-lighted a project that was supposed to be six months but is now two years in the making and still not complete? It is the preparation, planning, approval, implementation and training that make these opportunities for increased value a success.

Here we’ll explore those ideas that make such projects successful. We’ll delve into how to look at your operation with those objectives  in mind and explore IT solutions and their implementation with your people, process and technology in mind. We’d like to hear from you, too. We hope you will share your feedback and tell us what you want to know. If you have questions, contact us at 973-575-8324 or at info@fitechllc.com.