When Impact was called in recently to help a client clean up their storage room, we had no idea what we were in for. File boxes upon file boxes were stacked from floor to ceiling, in serious disrepair. Many were busting from the seams, which was compromising the safety of the materials inside the storage boxes.
Take a look at the before images below.
How would you like to be the unlucky person who has to find an important document in this room? Good luck.
Fortunately, we have a file storage box solution to fit your budget, that will help you keep documents in order, and most importantly, keep your files accessible.
Storage Room Before the Fellows Storage Box Makeover:
Just the facts:
- This company was using an off-site records storage company to store their business records
- They purchased the storage boxes from the records company, instead of buying the boxes from Impact Office Products
- Impact was able to provide them significant savings by suggesting they use Fellowes Mystic boxes #7150001
- Additionally, we showed them how to save thousands on their service fees by keeping their records on-site, in a small room, using Staxonsteel files
- 95% of the activity of a file occurs within the 1st 3 years. Staxonsteel files allow them to keep files on-site during those active years, thus saving thousands every year in unnecessary service and retrieval fees.
Storage Room After the Fellows Staxonsteel, Storage Box Makeover:
Solutions
-Order the boxes on our website (or call customer service at 240-542-1380).
-Schedule a expert consultant to visit your facility to assess your storage needs. Complete a plan of action for you, and help you get exactly what you need.
This is a free service.
We know that if we give you outstanding service and go the extra mile, you'll be a customer for life.
Does your stoarge room look anything like this?
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What's the best price I can get on____________?" When you go shopping, does this question cross your mind? Here's what you need to know to get the best value when you shop for office supplies for your company.
1. "Can you beat this price?" With over $17 Billion in office supplies purchasing power Impact Office Products gets the same great pricing as the "big" office supply stores. Yes, we can get you great pricing on everything for your office, but buyer beware what "cheap office supplies" are going to get you in the long run.
2. Watch out for prices that are too low. You just received an offer from a company that's advertising a price that seems too good to be true?
Tread lightly...
Office supplies are a commodity item. Everyone who is in business needs something that we sell. All vendors and dealers are typically buying at the same prices due to something called buying groups. These buying groups allow the independent regional dealers like Impact to buy as a collective group, and in turn get some incredible pricing that we pass on to you. Short story... office supply stores (big and small) are buying office products at the same price. Yep, we buy office supplies at the same price as the company with a big red button.
If one dealer is offering a price that is far below everyone else, it's extremely likely that they're selling below their cost. Do you know of any businesses that can continue to sell at a loss for an extended period of time? I do... but the companies all recapture the loss on other products.
Loss leaders or incentive introductory prices offered by other dealers may look great, but they drop those prices while raising the price of other items that fly below your radar. What does this mean for you? You'll pay more in the long run, so they can meet their sales quota.
3. Buy a partner, not office supplies. If all of the office supply companies are getting the same pricing, and can pass that along to you, what incentive do you have to go with one vendor over the other? Ask yourself a few questions:
- Let's assume that price is important to you. What else matters most when you buy from an office supply company?
- Emergency same day delivery?
- The ability to speak with someone without waiting on hold for extended periods?
- Next day servicing of coffee machines when there is a problem?
- Customized billing?
- Customized on line shopping website?
Once you know what matters to you, make up questions to ask your prospective vendors to make sure that they can deliver everything you need.
- What problems have I experienced with the service levels that I would like to avoid in the future?
- On-time delivery?
- Issues with receiving an invoice in a timely manner?
- No contact from the sales representative?
- What level of attention will I require to make my life easier?
- Impact offers it's customers a one-on-one level of attention that
the big guys just can't match. The big store business model is to start you with a sales rep, and then quickly transition you to customer service or to their website only. If that's what you're looking for, we can do that too; however, in our experience most customers want an ally. They need someone who has their back, and will partner with them to take care of any issues that may arise.
Let's face it... No matter whom you choose to do business with, you're going to encounter problems. It's the solutions to those problems that set an office supply vendor apart.
What solution can Impact Office Products offer you? Sign up to become an Impact customer, and find out today.
It's hard being the new person at the office. Everyone has been there before, but for some reason that knowledge just doesn't make it any easier. Added to that, is the fact the world is constantly changing. Even paper clips are changing (Acco Klix)... Maybe for the better. Either way, it makes shopping for supplies more difficult if you don't understand what new office supply options are available to you.
To help new admins who will be ordering supplies get on their feet 
more quickly, we decided to make at least one part of your life easier. With our new buyer guides web page, you can quickly figure out which product will make your supervisor's life better, which will in turn, make your life better.
Were you asked to find a binder that would meet certain specifications, and have it delivered tomorrow? Check out the guide for binders to get a clear picture on available features and terms specific to that product.
Your supervisor just asked you to research new chairs for the coorporate board room? Go to the Chair Features Buying Guide. It explains all of the terms that sound like Greek right now, to help you make an informed decision when it comes time to make the purchase.
Some of the the more popular buying guides include:
Not sure what a kraft pressboard folder looks like or where to find it...? Well... you may be better off calling our experts in Customer Service for that one (240-542-1380). We're always happy to hear from our clients, and excited to help you get exactly what you need.
In fact, leave a comment below, and let us know what other ways we can help make your life easier.
Right now, someone is attempting to take advantage of the lack of secure shredding procedures at your company to make a quick dollar.
To keep the trust of your clients, you need to focus on privacy and data protection which is under constant attack. Hackers, black market data sellers, and corporate espionage specialists are constantly on the look out for misplaced data.
Air tight data destruction measures are essential. During the course of a regular business day, documents are thrown away that have the potential to create havoc within a business or individual clients.
Think about it.
Are you guilty of throwing any of these into a trash can? Bids, business plans, receipts, invoices, customer lists, personnel information, hard drives, memory cards, computers, or bank records? You're putting a lot at risk if you're throwing any of these into the trash. The ability to get a certificate of destruction gives you more than piece of mind. It gives you proof of document destruction if there is ever a question of liability brought against you.
Fortune 500 companies are becoming increasingly aware of their responsibility to protect privacy information and are taking the necessary steps by implementing secure shredding and recycling programs. Consolidation substantially reduces the risk of confidential information reaching the public domain, and reduces a company’s liability.
Secure Shredding Services and Advantages
Secure Shredding Services are the most popular and air tight measures a company can adopt in order to protect themselves from such risks.
Here are the first 3 of 6 reasons why implementing professional secure shredding and recycling services are recommended:
1. To be on the Safe Side of the Law
Modern company law places emphasis on confidential agreements, and non-disclosure statements. Breach of these can prove very detrimental to a company in terms of liability.
Playing it safe, and destroying all confidential waste materials is the smart move here to keep your company out of the courtroom. Because these services typically offer a flat rate, you won't have to choose between which documents to shred and which ones to trust to the trash can. Shred it all!
One more thought... Have you looked at your local laws about what hardware you can throw in the trash? Office electronics and hardware require specific disposal in order to stay in compliance with the law. This story in USA Today highlights the importance of checking before you throw it: Electronic Hardware Disposal Laws
2. Secure and Professional Handling of Delicate Information from Data Destruction Experts
Professional shredding companies can assist a company in achieving data security as their experience and policy obligates them to handle every with caution. Chances are your employees are not going to give every document that crosses their desk the same kind of attention that a paid company would.
The shredder's business depends on your security. That equals skin in the game, and peace of mind for you.
3. Save Man Power Resources and Money
Here's some simple math:
The average office of 100 workers will spend a combined total time of 16.67 hours (that's 10 minutes per worker if they're shredding everything that they should be shredding), devoted to individuals shredding their own documents. If we use a low hourly wage, this is what you're spending per week.
How does it cost you for your employees to do all of the shredding?
16.67 Hrs of Shredding x $17.50 Hourly Wage = $291.73/ week
More importantly, these documents are still not safe as they are then set out as trash or recycling that can be easily recovered by the wrong people. Not only are you spending too much time shredding your own documents... You're risking your business. The question here isn't how much can you save. The question is how much can you afford to risk?
Then again, you might be surprised how much you can save, and still be safe with a secure shredding option.
Are you currently using a shredding service? If not, what concerns do you have about getting started?
In construction or design, there are two models to follow to achieve one of two kinds of spaces: designing from scratch, or as a renovation to an existing arrangement. The space created will foster either efficient channels of collaboration or creative ones. And these parameters are governed by one overarching constraint... your budget.
Collaboration Furnishing 101
The best way to save money is to make sure you don’t have to go back and fix mistakes that could have been avoided. So, before beginning, ask yourself a couple of basic questions:
- What’s a collaborative workspace?
- What kind of collaboration do you need?
The less your enterprise is designed to foster creativity as its core endeavor, the less your collaborative space will need to be a physical one. Instead, it will increasingly be a function of virtual space, conducted online using the Web, intranets, and commercially available collaborative software.
1. Efficient collaborative workspaces
Correspondingly, less input is needed from an interior designer. Most standard furniture is available from wholesale suppliers and your staff has three simple furniture requirements:
- Ergonomic chairs
- Properly sized cubicle walls
- Ample desk-space
If your business is also substantially worldwide (in staffing, customers, or both), then you may find that a cubicle-farm floorplan suits your purposes just fine. Shared physical and social space as an integral part of the workplace will be both unnecessary and unwanted. Coworkers inhabiting even adjacent cubicles may not know each other either personally or professionally, and share social and demographic backgrounds only by chance.
Thinking inside the box
The resulting mindset typically extends into the lunch areas, often the only shared social space to be found onsite. In these creatively sterile environments, private and public workspaces are essentially urban in that they are strictly segregated. Efficient collaboration is fostered by privacy, fairly strict rules of engagement, and relatively low-levels of disruptive sounds.
2. Creative collaborative workspaces
Think everything from start-up romper-room to carpenters’ cooperative. Here boundaries between public and private space will be fluid. This is the arena where you will be schooled in fostering spontaneous workspace collaboration, because freeform workplace communes will either regress to the mean or fall apart. Inexperience defines the enterprise, large or small. The past will be a poor guide because each location will have its own parameters, goals, and set of demographics. Your strategic goal will be to realize and furnish the floorplan that can help keep your revolution on track. Your choice:
Do it yourself or . . .
Get professional help
Entrepreneurs in need of easier learning curves will need expert design-advice as early as practical. The choice of an open floor-plan or closed, or some artistic combination, must be either considered in advance or, like it or not, confronted later. Creative furniture-design and layout must be more than scenery for it to encourage personal interaction, the first requirement of creative collaboration.
"You can't operate your business
in a space that's as quiet as a library,
or as noisy as a restaurant.
You must add a little sound to get
the right "signal to sound" ratio."
With the ability to hide noise, sound masking may be the solution that you're seeking. Sound masking is frequently used by law offices and doctors to protect the interest of their clients, and also in work places with high ambient noise.
How Does Sound Masking Work?
Sound masking smothers ambient and intrusive sounds with specific sound frequencies, that produce the effect of less noise. We may say that sound masking is all about the perception of the sounds we hear in any given environment. In short, sound masking fools the mind by flooding the ear.
Sound masking is used by architects, designers, and on site managerial personnel in environments where the sound levels are variable and essentially non-controllable. Classic examples of this would be offices (both public and private) following either an open or closed floor plan, and outdoor semi-enclosed public spaces subject to both natural and manufactured sounds.
Unlike active sound control, which focuses on neutralizing or minimizing physically and mentally harmful levels of excessive workplace noise from a specific source such as a heavy-duty industrial tool, sound masking is confronted by an entirely subjective problem: What is sound and what is noise?
Sound vs Noise
Noise and sound are different things to different
people, depending on the environment they find themselves. Therefore sound masking strategies and their technologies need to be highly specific to their location and mission, and yet general enough in their effects to affectively reduce noise perception for the greatest number of people, and to do so without them being consciously aware of it.
An artificial waterfall is useful to block the sounds of a nearby freeway, but can’t be installed in a working office to mask the sounds of a professional-sized copier. It would be too excessive and too general, so people would talk louder to counteract it.
A Better Work Envionment With Privacy Controls
This is the essential problem of sound masking: How can you add sound without making things 
louder? The best masking systems are able to manage this problem with advanced technology, that prevents conversations from being overheard, and produces a more quiet working environment at the same time.
What problems have you experienced with ambient noise in your office? What methods have you already implemented to control this problem?
Does your break room at work have fresh coffee brewing in it at 
all times? If it doesn't, maybe it should. Here are seven facts about coffee and productivity in the workplace you should know about. You can use them to convince your employer that your coffee service is in fact worth the money, whether you're in Maryland, Washington, DC, Philadelphia PA, Maryland, or another area in the country.
1. Coffee improves mental alertness and concentration
Most people know that your friendly office coffee vendor can help you stay awake, but now, it's been shown that office coffee actually helps improve mental performance. It actually makes employees more alert and focused. It's even been shown that coffee can improve short-term memory.
2. Coffee improves physical stamina
Your office's coffee service gives you more stamina physically. That's especially important if you work a lot of late nights or have a particularly demanding schedule. A water and coffee service or even a coffee food service can actually help you meet those big deadlines.
3. Coffee improves your ability to socialize
While your boss might discourage office chat anywhere but the break room, better socialization means a better work environment. Let's face it; if your cup of morning joe makes you feel more social, you're much more likely to deal well with what can sometimes be difficult interpersonal situations with clients or customers.
4. Coffee reduces stress
You might think that drinking coffee is actually a bad idea if you want to reduce stress levels. Not true. Drinking moderate amounts of coffee actually reduces stress by getting rid of excess cortisol in the body. Cortisol is a hormone your body produces when you're under stress, and chronically elevated levels can mean a greater susceptibility to illness. So go ahead. Take advantage of your office's coffee delivery service and indulge in a cup on a regular basis.
5. Coffee is high in antioxidants
Coffee is actually packed with antioxidants that can help you stay healthy. It doesn't really matter what kind of coffee it is, either. Certainly, you can use a specialty coffee vendor or a coffee gourmet service, but any coffee service company with good quality coffee will provide you the same health benefits.
6. Coffee puts you in a better mood
Modest amounts of coffee can actually put you in a better mood. It can make you feel more alert, and calm you down at the same time. That's an especially valuable office coffee solution if you need to stay cool under pressure.
7. Coffee can make you more productive
Coffee's ability to make you more mentally and physically alert can actually mean that you're more productive at work. That's especially true if a coffee service or coffee vendors are providing coffee "in-house," so that you don't have to leave the building to go get coffee. A study of employees showed that when they could quickly grab a fresh cup of coffee, they could get right back to work, with little downtime.
Which one of these facts about coffee do you agree or disagree with?
It's fall time, and that means that a lot of businesses are beginning to contact us about setting up a coffee service. Some already know which system that they would like to set up, but most often, they need a little help choosing the correct set up for their break room.
Our 3 Most Popular Office Coffee Solutions
1. Keurig- One of the most popular office coffee machines in the market today is the Keurig. It has great appeal due to it's sleek design, vast amount of coffee flavors, and it's impressive name brand (even if you struggle to pronounce it correctly) recognition.
What you need to know: Keurig systems come in many different models that allow you to choose for your specific application. You can choose models based on the number of people that will be consuming the coffee from 1 person- to hundreds of workers. Another great option is the ability to choose a machine that will connect to your plumbing (eliminating the need to refill the machine), or choose one that you can add water when you don't have a water line to connect. The problem that many have with the Keurig system is that there is a lot of waste in the form of the plastic K-cup. The owner of Keurig, Green Mountain, has informed us that they are working on a solution, and hope to have the more earth friendly version available soon.
2. Wolfgang Puck Brewer- This machine is incredible, and sets you up to look great to your customers and workers alike. With the ability to brew more than 80 custom drinks there is a coffee for everyone in your office. An optional side car enables the user to make hot chocolate, cappuccinos, and other mixed coffee drinks.
What you need to know: The Wolfgang Puck brewing system is more expensive than some other set ups, but if you're looking to impress, this is the way to go. Law Offices, government contractors, architechtual firms, and other high profile businesses love this system. Unlike the Keurig system, it uses an earth friendly coffee pod, that can actually be used in composting. The company will give you a green collection container so the pods don't end up in a landfill once they're used. Employees are then encouraged to take them home for their garden or compost.
3. Starbucks I-Cup- If you love Starbucks coffee, this is the system you've been looking for. With the ability to make decaffeinated or regular coffee, and Starbucks delicious hot cocoa, this machine carries a lot of bang for the buck.
What you need to know: The I-cup system is another machine that tends to attract companies looking to impress clientèle. It is generally recommended for offices that will have 40+ users each day. Believe it or not, the cost per cup of coffee is very comparable to other office coffee systems, and if you're already purchasing your morning cup of coffee from a Starbucks store you'll find that there is a significant cost savings here. Because it makes just one cup at a time, this machine is also considered earth friendly.
One more thing... If you are setting up a coffee lounge area and are looking to make some money or just offset your costs, this has an optional credit card pay option.
What type of coffee does your company currently offer to your employees and clients?
If you’re trying to supplement traditional advertising for your company, try a promotion. 
People love getting free giveaways from companies, especially free stuff they can use. Hats, bags, coffee mugs; all can work to build better recognition for your brand. Not sold yet? Below are some convincing numbers.
- A study by Georgia Southern University found that 71.6% of people who were given a promotional product remembered the name of the product. This is staggering in comparison to the recall rates for print or TV ads!
- 76.3% showed more favorability to the company that was hosting the giveaway.
- A random survey conducted by L.J. Market Research found that 33.7% of people who received a promotional item in the last 12 months had the product with them at the time of the survey.
- 52% of the study participants who received a promotional item became customers of that business.
- 73% of participants stated they used the product at least once a week.
Promotional marketing appears to be an ideal way to increase brand recall, strengthen a company image and generate goodwill towards a business. Why pay to run an ad over and over again when a product can market for you and create repeat exposures at no additional cost?
Even something as simple as a mug with your company logo on it will be a daily reminder for a potential consumer. Many websites offer a vast array of products that can easily be customized to reflect your brand, and promotional experts are on hand to help you select the perfect giveaway item.
To browse a wide selection of promotional materials visit:
http://www.impactofficepro.com/PromotionalItems/
What’s the best promotional item you have received? Share with us below.
Think of the last time you were ready to discard a bank or credit card statement. Chances are you didn’t throw it directly in the trash. Shredding documents with confidential information, whether it’s financial or otherwise is crucial to protect against identity theft and for a business- a key measure to ensure the privacy and protection of its clients.
Are You Legally or Ethically Bound to Safely Destroy Documents?
Your company may be required by law to shred documents. The FTC implemented the Gramm-Leach-Biley or GLB Act, in order to protect sensitive customer info including names, phone numbers, addresses, account numbers and social security numbers. Though the law is aimed at “financial institutions” the description is very broad, and may apply to companies that would not normally identify themselves as such.
Paper shredding is a practice implemented by many organizations as a safety guard, but can pose potential problems as well. For example, strip shredders cut paper into straight pieces that can easily be put back together, creating a potential problem for disposal. Shredding in-office also means assigning an employee to the mundane task, not to mention paying high prices for efficient, high-volume shredders.
Top 5 Reasons You Should Use a Shredding Service
Mobile-shredding services can solve many of the problems associated with document destruction. Advantages you may want to look for when selecting a mobile shredding company include:
- Certificates of Destruction- ensuring you that documents have been destroyed in a confidential manner and are not susceptible to misuse.
- High Shredding Capacity- professional shredders can get rid of a great volume of paper in a very short time relative to dinky desktop shredders.
- Scheduled visits- to keep your office up-to-date on discarding sensitive information.
- Lock Boxes- all confidential papers are temporarily disposed of in secure lockers that are only opened upon arrival of the mobile shredder.
- Socially Responsible Disposal- instead of cushioning a landfill with
destroyed documents most mobile document shredding includes proper recycling. Saving trees and disposal time is a win-win for any organization.
For information on our company’s Shredding and Recycling services visit: http://www.impactofficepro.com/recyclingandshredding/
What are your shredding solutions? Share with us below.