Richard McKay – Our Technology Diet

Richard McKay of McKay Flooring takes time out from his busy schedule to tell us about his company and how they use technology. I’ve been very impressed for quite a while by how Richard uses technology to help him manage his business. The article below written by Richard covers improved productivity, connectivity, brand awareness, contact management, financial savings… the list goes on! Find out how else Richard uses technology to improve his business for yourself by reading the article below. Thanks again Richard.
McKay Flooring are a family run hardwood flooring business located in Glasgow and have installing wood floors throughout the UK for over 35 years. In 2007 we installed more sports flooring than any other contractor in the UK. We install floors for both domestic and commercial customers and offer a sanding and sealing service for existing flooring. Zungalow is in the final stages of development and will be a social network for property.

Here’s a list of what we are using at the moment :-

Backpack – have started using this for storing important documents that we need to access; also for holding a copy of our suppliers’ price lists for easy access; have started implementing for our most simple contract jobs and plan on storing much if not all of our compnay info onto the cloud via BackPack.

Highrise (also by 37signals) – we will be utilising this for our Customer Relationship Management over the next few months (once we’ve moved premises).

Evernote – have opened an account with Evernote and would like to begin scanning and tagging documents for quick easy access as soon as possible. Really like this application as can be used on desktop too.

Spinvox – trialling this at the moment and impressed by the near perfect interpretations of all the Scottish (particularly Glaswegian) accents! It’s great to be able to respond with a text directly to whomever left the voicemail. Good for busy pubs, football and building sites.

Google Docs – increasingly using this office suite for Zungalow and will review whether this would also work for McKay Flooring. Would mean transferring everyone over from Outlook but also means staff could check emails from home without a VPN.

Samsung Q7 UMPC – perfect for when a laptop is maybe just too cumbersome though has been overshadowed recently by my Iphone.

Vodafone Dongle 3G Modem – this was really handy on holiday recently and ran pretty fast with my Sony Vaio and Samsung Q7.

iPhone – starting to get to grips with it (had to buy a book explaining how to use it as the manual was so basic) – hope to gte some more time to download some applications like Evernote, Twitter etc.

Twitter – i like Twitter and plan on using it more extensively in the future.

Ping.fm – glad i found this site as can now send an update to numerous social media sites, blogs, friendfeed etc

Blogger / WordPress– have used Blogger for McKay Flooring blogs and WordPress for Zungalow. Blogger seems easier to use though WordPress looks better in my opinion. Over the next 12 months we will supply each of our wood flooring installers with a digital camera so that we can build a database of case studies and show them on our blog and also FlickR and Picasa.

JVC Everio Camcorder – not had time to get to grips with this as yet but our aim is to include some relevant video on the McKay sites. Video will also feature on Zungalow.

SAGE – we have been using SAGE for over 10 years now. I don’t personally use it but our bookkeeper thinsk it’s a good system. I’d be interested if they had an online version.

http://www.mckayflooring.co.uk

http://www.zungalow.com