Executive Q&A: Scott Celley - Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce

Smart Technology
When QTS Payroll Services moved its 12
Arizona employees to Las Vegas, the company
still had a number of clients to service here. So
it hired Ben Kuntz last year to cover the Arizona
territory. “Now they just have me here as a
sales rep, and no one is doing my admin work,”
Kuntz says. “When that becomes part of your
task, you have to find ways to be more efficient.
A laptop computer, Droid phone and
wireless card are this road warrior’s constant
companions that allow him to stay in touch
with clients and potential customers. “People
are more hesitant today to make changes, but
if you keep in touch and show you care—that
you’re not just here to make a sale—chances
of closing are much greater in the future,”
Kuntz says.
He maintains to-do lists, a calendar and
follow-up information on his phone and
laptop. Kuntz is faithful about logging phone
calls and appointments into his electronic
calendar so that he gets regular reminders.
“If I’m on the road and it pops up, I have the
number in to-do and I just press ‘call.’ I have
a Google calendar that goes to my phone
wirelessly. It makes my life so much more
efficient,” he says.
Kuntz explains that anything he inputs into
his phone transfers wirelessly to his laptop,
10 IMPACT | SePTeMber 2010
and vice versa. “If I’m on the road and I’m
between appointments, I’ll pull into a parking
lot and pull out my laptop and put in my
wireless card rather than drive back to North
Scottsdale to get to my office. Sometimes I
won’t even make it to my office for two or
three days.”
Summerfield also relies on technology to
manage client activity at his one-man shop. “I
use programs like online conferencing. We have
a group of people, we can share desktops and
we can share documents,” he says. “There’s a
program by Microsoft called SharePoint. It can
be bought per user so it scales from all the way
down to a two- or three-person company up to
hundreds of thousands.”
SharePoint is a software platform for
collaboration and Web publishing that is used
for developing Web sites, content management,
search engines and other business tools.
“That’s a big time tool that even small
companies can use,” Summerfield says.
Cervantes employs a paperless system to
work smarter. “If a client needs something
quickly, we send it encrypted,” Cervantes says.
“In a minute we can pull up their files because
everything is available at our fingertips.”
Another essential business tool is e-mail, but
today’s workers have a love/hate relationship
with this form of communication. Either they
control it or it controls them. “Much time can
“Your business is not necessarily about making money,
it’s about optimizing your time. There are 100 things you can do a day,
but what’s the smart thing to do?”
- Jonathan Summerfield, Blue Avenue Design
be lost sifting through hundreds of e-mails,”
Akers warns. “People with jam-packed inboxes
are also more likely to forget to respond
to important communications, potentially
holding up a project or causing employees to
miss a deadline. You can save an hour a day
just organizing your in-box.”
Ben Kuntz of
QTS Payroll Systems
has mobility ability
thanks to technology.
www.phoenixchamber.com