On Friday, BusinessSuites was named the U.S. national winner of the Dell/National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Small Business Excellence Award. The Austin, Texas-based company has become an industry leader and offers clients fully furnished offices equipped with ready-to-go Internet, mail, phone, professional staff, and meeting rooms under flexible terms. BusinesSuites has 55 employees and more than 1, 400 clients.BusinesSuites will receive $25, 000 in Dell products and services, a lifetime membership to NFIB valued at $15, 000 (including a trip to NFIB’s National Small Business Summit), and a day of best-practice sharing with Dell experts, including time with chairman and CEO Michael Dell.
“We doubled the size of the company in 2002 and quickly realized our systems and infrastructure were inadequate to deal with the growth, ” said BusinessSuites president John Jordan. “Money was tight, but we began investing heavily in our systems and our people. We believe these investments saved our company. By using technology to reduce costs, push responsibility out to all levels of the company, improve the client experience, and leverage a smaller infrastructure, we reached a profit level in 2008 which was double what we had originally envisioned.â€
An example of what Jordan was referring in regard to using technology was the development of a Web-based operations management system that generates and electronically distributes invoices and client satisfaction surveys, schedules meeting rooms for clients, tracks prospective clients and other functions. In addition, team members are encouraged to learn the technology clients use so they can provide hands-on advice and support, and the company also uses an internal Wiki to share information, as well as store hardware and software manuals created by the team.
