Expediting the Startup Process for Small Businesses

In today’s tough economy small businesses and entrepreneurs need new, innovative and cost effective ways to springboard their ideas into a business quickly.  They need the tools and expertise to ensure they hit the ground running, especially given this financial climate.  Small businesses need immediate optimization in marketing, a full SEO & mobile website, and EDI capabilities to integrate e-commerce & retail platforms to instantly garner the attention of consumers and retailers.

What has been lacking in the marketplace for small businesses is an online social community where through a single source, they can solve their supply chain needs, network with other small businesses, and collaborate with business experts that span across a wide variety of business sectors.  However, the business experts must be carefully screened and invited into the social community based on their business acumen and proven track record of success.

This kind of controlled access to the social community ensures that professional, expert services are offered and advice given without underhanded sales tactics, such as spamming, which can be prevalent in open-invitation social networks such as LinkedIn.

Providing Small Businesses with a Competitive Advantage

As an entrepreneurial start-up in 2008, we spent the last few years evaluating, refining and partnering with like-minded, entrepreneurial small business owners and business experts to help launch and grow our own small business.  Through our own trials and errors, we have performed all the due diligence in the outsourcing process to successfully launch a small business.

Now, we’re excited to take it to the next level by launching our own social community to further enhance our customers experience by increasing their access and visibility to tools, small business experts, technology experts, retailers, and a host of other companies we do business with.

Additionally, the big-box retailers are ecstatic over the collaboration and innovation amongst our small business customers as they cross-sell and up-sell with one another, and therefore have been more inclined to buy from them.  This approach is giving our customers a true competitive advantage in the market place.

Supply Chain Solutions…Simplified

Our premise is really quite simple, Customer First Warehouse Services offers small businesses and entrepreneurs warehousing, order fulfillment and product returns services using leading technology, systems integration & industry best practices as the foundation.

Our warehouse management system is electronic data interchange (EDI) connected with most shopping carts, 1,500 retailers and various ERP’s.  For small businesses, this becomes a virtual plug and play especially when it comes to doing business with big-box retailers who, in some instances, require an EDI connection.

We also provide integrated transportation solutions through our partnerships with carriers such as Federal Express, UPS, U.S. Postal Service and a number of other transportation companies.  With all of our customers combined shipping volumes, we are able to achieve significant transportation discounts that are passed on to our client base.

To complete our suite of logistics services, we handle product returns (RMA or reverse logistics) for small businesses.  We implement procedures to make your returned products available for resale right away through our comprehensive testing, refurbishing, decontamination and repackaging services.

Financial Flexibility and Cost Savings Realized

Financial benefits to small businesses through our order fulfillment and reverse logistics services include a month-to-month agreement and 100% variable, per unit pricing with no minimums.  This flexibility means small businesses can shrink and grow each month and only pay for what they use.  This is great for small businesses, especially those with seasonality concerns.

Another tremendous benefit of our combined supply chain and social community services to small businesses is customer service through our ability to interact with customers real-time using the social community versus waiting for emails to exchange.

This makes order changes, status updates and inventory queries easier than a phone call (and less expensive).  Since our logistics solutions address small businesses supply chain needs, this allows customers to use our social community to address the remaining hurdles to starting a business.

When our customer’s collaborate and partner with other businesses in our social community, the costs and time savings continue to improve as our social community can be used to communicate overall company needs and reduces point of contact to one place for all small business needs.  This dramatically reduces costs in email bandwidth, phone service and employee time and expense.

Support beyond the Startup Phase as a Small Business

Our supply chain and logistics tools, resources and expertise are second to none.  Our owner comes from a global logistics company and has acquired state of the art systems and tools, and built a scalable solution to ensure start-ups can grow to fortune 1000 companies without experiencing growing pains.

With ownership on site, decision-making is streamlined and gives small businesses agility to keep pace with ever-changing requirements.