Android Users Read This

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Stephen Jagger

As you may have heard, Android phones have a new vulnerability – and it’s pretty bad. It has been covered on most major tech blogs and media outlets.

From NPR:

Android is the most popular mobile operating system on Earth: About 80 percent of smartphones run on it. And, according to mobile security experts at the firm Zimperium, there’s a gaping hole in the software — one that would let hackers break into someone’s phone and take over, just by knowing the phone’s number.

In this attack, the target would not need to goof up — open an attachment or download a file that’s corrupt. The malicious code would take over instantly, the moment you receive a text message…

Here’s how the attack would work: The bad guy creates a short video, hides the malware inside it and texts it to your number. As soon as it’s received by the phone, Drake says, “it does its initial processing, which triggers the vulnerability.”

Google has already issued a patch for this vulnerability.

BUT, most Android patches don’t make it to existing smartphone owners. They first have to be dealt with by the manufacturers of the phones (of which there are many) and then by telco themselves. Both of which don’t happen super fast – which results in million’s of Android devices being vulnerable to this issue.

At PayrollHero, we push Apple as our prefer platform for clients to use for clocking in and out. We support Android, but most of our new features come out for iOS first. Plus, there are so many added benefits that Apple brings, security being one of them, but other built in features like Guided Access.

Apple does not have this same problem as Android as Apple has controlled the relationship with the telcos and has the ability to push updates to iOS phones themselves. No need for the telco to get involved and Apple makes the hardware, so no manufacturers to deal with.

What To Do After The 3rd Store Grand Opening

Posted on June 4, 2015 by

Image by decor8blog.com

Success in your business would mean it’s time to expand, but this feat does not come without it’s own set of challenges.

After interviewing 3 different owners for our Retail/ Restaurant Executive Series, I’ve learnt that they all faced similar challenges in management, as soon as they’ve reached their 3rd store opening.

Here are some of the problems and solutions used by our retail/ restaurant executives when managing multiple store locations.

Keep Calm

Managing multiple locations means using technology to cut down on travel expenses

Implementing a different management system is necessary when you have several stores to oversee. Although it is not impossible, but it takes a lot of effort for you to constantly schedule your travel time to supervise different stores at different locations. Travel costs will pile up even more if your stores are located at different countries.

Getting your hands on free, cheap or available SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions will be save your company a chunk of money. While some businesses have their own custom- built software platforms as collaborative platforms, some of the more commonly-used tools are available online and widely used by small business owners. Some of the best cost saving productivity tools are available online- free or at low monthly costs like Google Documents, Skype, PipelineDeals.com.

As mentioned by our retail executive Andrew Masigan, owner of The Advent Manila Hospitality Group in the Philippines, he advice that “the trick is to put the important systems in place… the efficiency your company’s chain-of-command largely determines
how well your stores operate”.

Managing multiple locations means having putting a system in place

“You must have systems in place to be able to standardize the quality of your communications, products and results,” says Bert Martinez, founder of Bert Martinez Communications. Ensuring a strong internal system of operations would mean that you can save costs on training and reduce time required for supervision. Each employee will have a clear understanding of their responsibilities and boundaries.

In our interview with Adrien Desbaillets, President at SaladStop, he says that “a strong infrastructure is required to support the operation. Overheads start to escalate and a strong focus on SOPs, training, technology is required.” The point here is then to make each employee’s responsibility crystal clear through an organised structure and combine that with a system that measures each person. That way, everyone is accountable for delivering their work regardless of which location they are based at.

Managing multiple locations means shifting from micro management to systematized macro management

Before, Eileen Grey– owner of The Picture Company in the Philippines, didn’t need to think about an entire infrastructure when she opened her first store. She recalls it being just “very personal and mom and pop” until her 3rd store opening. Now she has to consider personnel training, back office space, production, logistics and others.

Having systems and technology in place is good for the business, but it wouldn’t help much if there is no focus on communication. Establishing good communication practices within the whole business is key to collaborate with offices at different locations, co-workers and clients.

Good tips to foster good communication between offices at different locations can include using webcams during weekly team meetings or webinars so team members can see each other, establish a daily reporting system online and use a centralized task management software like Asana, Trello and others.

(Read on how PayrollHero stays in sync with our other offices across the globe)

PayrollHero can help you efficiently manage your multiple business locations and cut down on costs. Talk to us about our business or meet us at our next Meetup!

Meetup on Growth Hacking in Asia

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Pragya Gupta

Yesterday, Aulia and I stepped out of the office after work and headed to Ayer Rajah Crescent for a Meetup. It was on Mastering SEO to Boost User Acquisition, hosted by Growth Hacking Asia and Silicon Straits Co.Lab. Growth Hacking Asia is an organisation that advises Asian startups on how to succeed. The speaker was Jeff Li, SEO Manager at Expedia Asia and Head of SEO at AirAsiaGo. Jeff gave us some invaluable insight that we thought we should share and spread the love a little bit.

Jeff first explained to us how Google crawlers work. Page rankings are based on how relevant the page is according to Google. The factors that make up relevance involve keywords, links that lead to your page, quality of links, responsiveness of your page and site structure to name a few.

While keywords are important, Jeff says:

“SEO strategy has shifted from
keyword focused to topic focused”

Content in your website is key to bringing in traffic. The search user’s journey begins with the Search Interest, then to the Search Engine Results Page, followed by the landing page and finally the conversion from just a page visit to the action that we want the user to take. Therefore, having content that is relevant and useful to your target audience will get more hits and pull up your rankings.

A good reminder about content: Content should be shared in a way that makes your site look original, not in an attempt to crack Google’s algorithm.

Next, focusing on content will get you nowhere unless you know where to put it. Spamming is a big no-no because it creates a bad name. Paying a blogger a minimal fee to write about you may backfire if the channel that the blogger posts it on is not relevant to you. However, asking a guest blogger to write on your site may bring links back to you. Similarly, writing about another blogger and going by a pay-it-forward philosophy is great for both parties’ site traffic and creates goodwill: something like good internet karma.

While we are on the topic of linking, we never forget to link our site’s homepage to different parts of the site like the product category, the merchant page and general content pages. These pages are further linked to our products. However, linking these pages back up the chain is important too. A good internal linking strategy keeps the user on the site by giving more relevant information, which could lead to a higher conversion rate.

Jeff then gave some neat tools to learn how to optimize websites. Screaming Frog is a tool that simulates search engine crawlers. It helps you understand whether your site is accessible by crawlers. Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmaster) is a great tool to pull up your page rankings and “be found”, as Google puts it.

With all these tools, the 2 biggest challenges with SEO are the following:

Understanding the huge amount of data that you have on your site
Figuring out what your competitor is doing

While the second point is an inevitable evil, we can do more about the first point. When asked what an SEO team should aim for, Jeff gave us some KPIs:

Conversion rate
Traffic
Rankings

The second and third points lead back to the first: how to generate leads by first generating traffic, then pulling up your page rankings and eventually taking off your business from there. Simple in theory, but an elusive concept at best.

How You Can Fill Your Restaurant Using A Website

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Stephen Jagger

Screen Shot 2014-05-01 at 2.20.44 PM We have been coming to the Philippines since 2008. Travelling all over the region and dining at many different types of establishments.

One thing that I found odd was that many of the restaurants did not have their own web presence. It was common, that I would search Google for “Italian Restaurant Eastwood” or “Sushi in Fort Bonifacio” only to find MunchPunch listings or similar services.

While MunchPunch is a fantastic website and drives lots of traffic to your restaurant, you still need your own website that you control.

In other instances, I have been sent the name of a restaurant for where a lunch of dinner is being held. I would then Google that restaurants name to find their address details so that I can add it to my schedule. More often that not, I’m getting this information from 3rd party websites that are NOT controlled by the restaurant itself. This is not a good way to ensure people looking for your business find it.

These days, websites are cost effective to setup and manage. There is no excuse for a restaurant to not have their own.

How do you get started?

1. Buy a domain name (RestaurantName.ph) GoDaddy is one of the cheapest places to do that.

2. Get a basic website setup. You don’t need to get fancy with the design at first, there are lots of template designs that make it very simple. Check out WordPress, Ghost and platforms like Ubertor.

3. Make sure your website has all of the information it needs. We made a handy infographic specifically on this topic, see below:

10 Things You Need To Add To Your Website (Philippines) INFOGRAPHIC from PayrollHero

Interested in learning more about PayrollHero for your Philippine restaurant business? Contact us for a free, no obligation consultation about our platform.

Doing Things That Don’t Scale

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Kalibrr CEO Paul Rivera at the e27 Echelon Conference

When Paul Rivera, the CEO of Kalibrr was in Silicon Valley as part of Y Combinator he and I were chatting about how it was going. One of the things he mentioned was that Paul Graham suggested that all of the startups do things that don’t scale. Since then, Paul Graham has written an essay on why he wants startups to “do things that don’t scale” and Jason Fried has recently followed it up with his own thoughts on his blog.

I wanted to take a moment to talk about how we have been doing things at PayrollHero. Many of the internal functions we have been completing have been manual out of choice, but some simply because we just did not have enough resources to automate them at this time – or better yet, we have our resources working on other higher priority tasks.

As with any startup, decisions must be made on what to do, what not to do, what to automate and what to do manually.

At PayrollHero, much of the business development and client happiness (read: customer service) departments tasks are completed manually. We do this out of choice so that we can stay hyper focused on the customer’s needs, likes, dislikes, issues, questions, etc.

Business Development
For business development most of our leads come in through online marketing but we funnel all of those leads into a web form that drops the details into my email. We do this for a few reasons;

– We wanted to make that we were paying close attention to every lead that came in. I email back and forth with each of them to ensure that they are the right fit for PayrollHero. As a startup, we end up saying no, more than we say yes. It is very hard to do, but we have found that focusing on a specific niche enables us to deliver a fantastic product for that tight niche. This will slowly loosen up as we continue to expand the platform.

We do use some automation, leads are added to our Highrise and MailChimp accounts, there is also a quick auto-responder that is sent out from the Wufoo form that directs the lead to our YouTube page as well as answers a few commonly asked questions. That auto-responder ensures that the lead knows we have received the inquiry and provides them with some details of questions we know they will ask when we start emailing back and forth with them. (we know thanks to our one on one calls that we conduct)

– As we worked over the last year to understand the onboarding process of new clients we found that handling all leads that were coming in manually, was the best way to understand not only what they were looking for, but how they currently handled their time, attendance, scheduling and payroll, what their pain points were and what part of our offering caught their attention.

– For leads that are qualified, and interested in taking the next step we do a Skype or Google Hangout call to run through how the platform works. We have recently begun using YouTube to showcase the walkthrough that we would normally do with the client. Sometimes both are needed but we are ready now to start documenting the individual features of the platform as we start to ramp up. Our YouTube videos are also embed into our Zendesk knowledge-base so that leads/clients can not only read about how certain features work but watch as well.

Zendesk’s Nick Franklin (Head of Sales SE Asia) and Michael Hansen (VP) at the PayrollHero offices for the Zendesk bootcamp in our “think tank”

– We also do in-person bootcamps as well as online webinars to educate leads/clients on how PayrollHero works. Webinars are much more scalable than bootcamps but both have been effective tools in growing our client base. We have been working closely with Zendesk’s head of Southeast Asia Business Development and done a few events with them across the region.

There is much more to the business development side of the business but these are some examples of how we handle things manually. We will automate the systems we have in place in short order, but doing them manually from the start has provided us with much needed feedback and direction for where to take PayrollHero.

Client Happiness Team
For our client happiness team we onboard new clients manually in almost every way. Our focus has been to understand what the process is with new clients and constantly tweaking it so that we can continually improve.

We use Asana to create tasks for all new clients that need to be onboarded and have a task template that gets added so we know what still needs to be done. This task template includes items like adding employees (we do the heavy lifting to get the employees in), setting up, customizing for how the client handles things like earlies, lates, overtime, undertime, etc. As you can image, every client does things differently when it comes to the internal workings of their business. We work to understand their unique setup and tweak our platform so that it best suites them.

One of the best pieces of advice that we ever got was from Daniel Debow who said that no matter what, make the system as flexible as possible as no matter how similar some clients seem, they will still do things very differently from each other. This initial feedback was why we built fully customizable system permissions, thresholds and much more.

But, just because we do many things manually now, does not mean that this is always the plan. As we continue to grow we continue to automate certain functions of our sales and onboarding process. In a few months we will move from being mostly manual to mostly automated and we will apply the learnings we have had from the last year and a bit to automating our systems.

If you are interested in PayrollHero, feel free to reach out as we would be pleased to chat further about your needs.

If you are in business development or customer service, let us know in the comments what tools you use within your business. We are always interested to learn more.

2 Days of Training (Zendesk and PayrollHero)

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Our office in the Philippines is used by quite a few companies for events. We have, what we call, a “think tank” that works great for events. We have been the location for Google, Amazon and most recently been asked to host an event for Zendesk.

Zendesk is running a day long session on April 17th 2013 in our think tank and since Zendesk and PayrollHero share a few customers we thought it would make sense to run a bootcamp of our own the day before to make it easy for companies that wanted to attend both.

Join us!

PayrollHero – April 16th 2013 (Register Here)
Zendesk – April 17th 2013 (Register Here)