When was the last time you called your own business and listened to your voicemail greeting? If you’re like most, it’s probably not that often. Voicemail greetings are one of those things we all tend to set and forget. The thing is, your voicemail is often the first impression a new customer gets of your business.

“Leaving the generic greeting either says that you don’t care or that you don’t know how to change the greeting,” says Ivana Taylor for DIY Marketers. And if you can’t handle voicemail settings, what does that say to customers about your business?

Robotic voicemail messages can give customers the wrong impression about how you run your business. Don’t make the same mistakes you’ve heard on other businesses’ voicemail. Create a voicemail greeting that makes customers feel as welcomed and delighted as they would be by walking in your door.

Startup failure rates are infamously high. The U.S. Small Business Administration reports that regardless of the year a business is founded, the majority of the business will go out of business within five years and two-thirds are no longer operating ten years after being formed.

Growth is a good problem to have, unless of course you fail to manage it properly. Growing too fast is one of the top 10 leading problems that trips up small businesses and results in those high failure rates.

This week’s employee spotlight is on Gabriel Ong. Gabe is a senior systems engineer on the network operations team here at Grasshopper.  He works on and maintains the system and network infrastructure for the Grasshopper platform.

Let’s get to know Gabe…

Meetings. Does anybody enjoy them? Nothing is more telling than when you announce the end of meeting and everyone at the table suddenly lurches back into consciousness. Were they all asleep? Was anything really accomplished?

According to some pretty shocking statistics, the answers to those questions might sadly be “yes” and “no,” respectively. In Entrepreneur.com, Carol Tice quotes the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as having estimated that unnecessary meetings cost the U.S. economy $37 billion a year. Thirty-seven billion dollars.

Phone ringing off the hook? What a great problem for a small business have! Though you’d probably agree that too many phone calls is preferable to the sound of crickets, managing a tidal wave of customer calls is a tough job.

Is it better to have an employee field every call? If you ask anyone who’s spent an entire day fielding calls, you’ll probably decide it’s not.

After hearing how many times the same basic information was repeated and how many calls resulted in messages you or another staff member need to return anyway, all of the other things you could have had that employee working on instead of acting as a human voicemail greeting suddenly seem a lot more important.