Talks From Q2 2008
Staying in Constant Contact (and off the black-list)
At Table XI, our role in our clients’ businesses goes beyond building websites. We often serve as the IT department for smaller companies that lack the capacity to handle technical functions in-house.
However, we will gladly off-load technical work to a third party if it means we can focus on our core competencies — things like developing technical architecture plans, or analyzing sales data to find customers most likely to buy what you’re selling.
With spam quantities increasing, spam filters constantly evolving and laws that penalize unsolicited emailing, we’re safe in the hands of a company that protects our reputation and increases email readership.
Constant Contact is meticulous in preventing their services from sending spam. Recipient lists are scrutinized to only include people who have opted in and campaigns are suspended when more than one of every 1,000 recipients reports an email as spam.
These efforts have earned Constant Contact the designation of trusted sender — allowing emails from their servers to be “white-listed,” bypassing spam filters.
Constant Contact makes it easy to maintain multiple sets of contacts, to manage numerous marketing campaigns at once and to create email templates so that regular communications share a consistent design without having to recreate each message from scratch.
The features we enjoy most are statistical reporting and the ability to integrate Constant Contact and Google Analytics, which results in a powerful ability to track the success of your campaign.
With Constant Contact handling the mailing, we can spend our time doing things like drafting marketing messages more likely to convert readers into buyers. The proof of our synergy is in the marketing pudding: our work with online retailers Dickson and The Spice House has produced a return on investment well over 100 per cent.
In fact, we like Constant Contact so much that we use it to send out our own newsletters. If you’re interested in trying it out, give us a shout or click here.
Drooling For Dollars
At Table XI we pride ourselves on finding elegant solutions to our clients’ business and technology problems. But with so much attention paid to our clients, we sometimes forget about ourselves.
Submitting timely timesheets has plagued us since day one. Our staff members find entering hours tedious, particularly when hard at work. We tried policy after policy, issued edict after edict, but despite the repeated calls, few were diligent enough to maintain hourly logs.
Lag in hour-entry meant delayed invoicing, and days of lost productivity while people scoured emails and instant messenger logs trying to figure out where their time went.
Our friend at RHR International, Nancy Picard, had a simple solution: give employees $5 cash at the end of each day their hours are kept current. Like Pavlov and his dogs, tightening the positive feedback loop encouraged staff to do the right thing, solving the problem practically overnight.
With everyone entering their hours daily, our logs are more detailed, with time being reported in fifteen to ninety minute intervals instead of three or four hour blocks.
Real-time hour-entry means we can:
- offer hourly reporting to our clients on a weekly basis so they know where their money is going
- invoice clients on the first of the month, improving our cash flow
- better analyze the accuracy of our estimates
- avoid being blind-sided when projects take longer than planned
$25 per employee per week across a staff of eight may seem like a big investment, but it pays dividends in increased accuracy and reduced frustration. And while such incentives may seem canine, nobody feels like they’re being thrown in with the dogs.
We are growing.... (basil, chives, and oregano, that is.)
What began as an attempt to fill space once consumed by an aquarium has sprouted into a touch of greenery for the office, and fresh fare for our chefs. 
That’s right - chefs. Plural.
As things at Alinea heated up for our first chef, he had to scale back his cooking for us to every other week. Having in-house feasts left us so spoiled we had no choice but to hire Powerhouse Restaurant’s Ethan Taylor to serve it up on René’s off-weeks.
When we’re really lucky, Ethan brings his girlfriend Autumn Lewis — also an accomplished cook — to serve as his sous-chef. Their food is fantastic. We didn’t know how much we’d been missing in life before tasting their truffle oil and smoked cheddar macaroni.
While he may be the most gastronomically tantalizing, Ethan isn’t the only new addition to Table XI. We are eager for June, because that’s when Columbus, Ohio native Alex Hanna officially joins our growing team of software developers.
Alex recently earned a computer science degree from Purdue University (complete with the requisite psychology/sociology double-minor), and comes to us as the most highly touted young programming prospect in the history of the company. We think it’s possible Alex paid his references to say such amazing stuff about him, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now! Alex should be fully trained and earning his keep by the beginning of July.
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