Office Services-Ideas

[eastfield]

Hi everybody. I am in need of a few ideas to kick start our our department .I know a good place to start is with this community I have posted here before and was impressed by the thought provoking suggestions. To give you some background. I work part-time for a charity the caters for people recovering from mental health illnesses of one kind or another. This is not to be confused with mental disability.Generally the voluntary service users are 25+ and desire to get back into the world of work ,with all the disciplines it entails. We try to create a real working environment by offering local peolpe office services. No big contracts are involved. We are part funded by the local authority who pay our rent however we need to generate income as a any business to convince our funders we are a worthwhile cause. The service users have varied background but are not highly skilled and have some past exposure to working in an office. My aim is to raise their IT literacy with Micorsoft office suite ect and teach them other office administration procedures.This does not generate income since, it is teaching. Out of 50 service users One can word process very well as she was a top flight secretary. The others cannot touch type although they are learning to at our office through my instruction. We need to win small or lagre office service contracts and short/intermediate or long term jobs so that the 49 other members of the vouluntary workforce can do something meaning ful in the office that is CUSTOMER FOCUSED. This will enable them to grasp of how important it is to work for a customer and all the disciplines involved including teamwork,punctuality,goal setting and contributing to the bottom line. At the moment we have a Pavement signboard with the following offering for the genreral public:


OFFICE SERVICES @

21 ST. JAMES St

1. personal secretarila services
2. Internet & Email
3. Shtredding
4. Scanning
5. Photo-copy
6. Mailshots
7. Laminating
8. Colour & B/W Printing


Since we only have one person capable of doing DTP-secretarial work to a high standard what additonal office services can we advertise on the pavement sign-board that the reamining 49 can do ? Secondly since we have a list of what those 49 have done in the past how do we sell the ideas to local businesses that we have a workforce ?Thirdly, how do we get local businesses or sole traders intersted in what we do besides expensive target advertising we do not have money for ?

I welcome your thoughts on this.


Eastfield

[M_Six]

In some states you can have runners go to the Registry of Motor Vehicles to register a car (or cars). There's similar services for filing other municipal documents.

There's mail and grocery delivery servcies. Courier services. (Not really office related, though.)

You could offer a business card service. Plenty of software available for that.

Just some thoughts.

[OuTpaTienT]

Well, one idea to maybe help get more business aware of your services is to see if any of the nearby personnel services (temp agencies) might be willing to pass your name to their customers in certain situations. What I mean by that, is quite often temp agencies have trouble filling some positions, especially the positions that many of their temp employees don't want to do (or think they deserve something better). I could be wrong about this, but I bet the temp agencies, as a last resort, would rather refer their clients to your organization over them going to a competing temp agency.

Possibly even you could arrange with the temp agency to legitimately employ some of your students as they progress to the point where you think they are ready to start going out on their own.

I don't have any idea how feasible this might be, but since we're brainstorming here, this was just an idea that crossed my mind.

---
So is all the work done there in your office or do you guys also offer your services to businesses on site? Well, depending on that answer, some of the following ideas may not be doable. I'll just list what comes to mind and you can decide what's appropriate and what's not.

As far as other jobs you could add to your sign, what about:

- Envelope stuffing
- Booklet or brochure assembly
- Filing
- Retrieving archive files (many companies have rooms of archived files in boxes and everyone hates having to retrieve documents from them)
- Preparation of documents for archiving (many companies are required to keep hard documents for a number of years. They send boxes of documents to storage companies. But before they do that they have to organize their documents, box them up, correctly label all the boxes, and keep an accurate record of exactly what's in each box so if necessary they can request the box back from storage.)
- Disbursement of flyers or such (?)

---

That's all for now, at least until my second cup of coffee kicks in.

[eastfield]

Those are excellent suggestions.I particularly want to explore the temp agencies,however, my concern is that the state who pays the voluntary employees benefits to live/get by will not allow volunteers to be paid by employers unless they sign off the benefits register.Eventually they will sign off whene they are ready to return to the job market.

Thanks for your input. I will explore this.

Eastfield

[OuTpaTienT]

Hey, how come no one else is offering ideas here? This is a brainstorming session. There are no bad ideas. Toss everything out, and it'll get sorted later.

[OuTpaTienT]

FWIW eastfield, I apologize for my comrades...they're usually much more helpful than this.

[sixf00t4]

OuT has the good ones listed...all i can really think of all really fall under the secretarial jobs

just throwing ideas out there, mentioned already or not...

mass letter distrubution (for like surveys, people give you addresses and a letter, and you envelope them, and copy the letter enough times)

any kind of typing or documenting. (typing someones book, compiling a handbook for employers, etc)

maybe you can throw in the idea of "custom" or "creative" letters. and have designed fonts and letterheads and such.

as far as getting your name out, nothing works better than a firm hand shake and a smile. just go around to local businesses in person and ask if they need anything. and give them a business card

making business cards is a good one

making large posters and banners for events and such was a good business for a friend with a huge printer.